All We Need sets to music Annie Finch's poem “Earth Day," which is a celebration of all that the planet offers us as well as a plea to respect what we find here.

 

The recurring refrain of the piece is simple, but profound: “All we need” is to find love in what we already have, both in the “faces of the people we love” and on the earth itself. If, as Annie writes, we need to “live with the memory / of a future we want to imagine,” then it is also up to us to create this future in the way we live our lives every day.

 

All We Need was commissioned by the Ithaca College Choir, Janet Galván, conductor.

 

Want to program All We Need? Preview the score or purchase it here.

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EARTH DAY

 

All we want is to find the love
in the faces of the people we love.
All we need is to find the dark
in the nighttime sky, to lie down to sleep
in the darkness, where stars and moon keep vigil,
in the silence of a sleeping earth.
All we require is to wake to sunlight
in the morning, to simple sky,
to breathe aloud as the sky is breathing,
to drink the water of the earth.
​All we need is to touch the planet
and find it clean where we were born,
where our ancestors breathed and planted,
where we live with the plants and birds.
All we need is to live with the memory
of a future we want to imagine.
​All we want is to find the love
​in the face of the planet we love.

 

—Annie Finch

From Spells: New and Selected Poems 

(Wesleyan University Press, 2013)