2003
The End
Ned Rorem 
Dana Gioia Text
The End
by Dana Gioia
Last night I dreamed the end had come.
Silent, impotent, invisible as air,
I stood by in a hundred places:
a stranger’s house, a city street, an office and a garden–
and like a sleeper shaken from a dream
I witnessed what I could not understand.
A woman washing dishes at a sink
looked out her window calmly as she heard
something unexpected in the air.
Men on the sidewalk, drivers in the street
observed the weather in a cloudless sky
and kept going.
In an office clerks and secretaries glanced up
at the clock without remembering the time.
I saw the same cold profile everywhere at once–
a pale face looking up against the light,
then bending down again indifferently,
only this dull reflex of acceptance,
then nothing else, nothing ever again.
Sheet Music
50 Collected Songs
Love
Alleluia
The End
Chromatic Fantasy
For Susan
Orchids
Psalm 150
The Nightingale
Absalom
A Birthday
A Child Asleep in Its Own Life
Conversation
A Journey
The Land of Fear
Little Elegy
The Lordly Hudson
Nantucket
O Do Not Love Too Long
On a Little Bird
Poem for F.
The Serpent
Shelley's Vision
The Sick Wife
Spring (Hopkins)
Spring (Koch)
The Waking
What if some little pain...
While Sodom was occupied
A Glimpse
He Thinks Upon His Death
Philomel
Rain in Spring
You, the young Rainbow
Early in the Morning
Are you the new person?
Catullus: on the Burial of His Brother
Ferry me across the water
I strolled across an open field
I will always love you
Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair
Look down, fair moon
Love in a Life
On a Singing Girl
Sometimes with one I love
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Such beauty as hurts to behold
That shadow, my likeness
To a Young Girl
Visits to St. Elizabeths