Words and music …

… Humble Grass: Wayside Conversations on the Jerusalem Road by Maureen Swinger. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

We don’t know how Bristol came across these four exquisite stanzas by Dominican-American poet Rhina Espaillat. That detail would be fascinating to discover, but Bristol died in 1979 at age fifty-six after an extended illness, and Espaillat only recalls a brief exchange of permission letters from 1953. She would have been twenty-one at the time.