Rain Come Down

Background

The day after the Columbine school shooting, I was driving home from work in the rain.  This song came to me.  I had been thinking about the students bringing flowers to the school parking lot and laying them on the cars of their fallen classmates, who would never drive them home again.  It reminded me of how we had taken flowers to the place where my mother had been killed the previous year, in not dissimilar circumstances — at the hand of a disturbed, violent young man.

My family also knew full well that there’s nothing right to say when enduring such a sudden, traumatic loss as the murder of a loved one.  Such sentiments also made their way into the song: “Say no words; it is too soon.  Say no words out loud.  But wrap your quiet arms around, hide us in your cloud.”

I entered the SATB choral arrangement of this song in the University of Oregon’s “Waging Peace through Singing” choral composition contest, and won for the category of High School Chorus.  I was glad to make the piece available as well for treble choirs in a SSA arrangement.

Come rain, come down.
Come rain, come down.
Heaven’s tears of mercy,
come a-runnin’ down.

Say no words; it is too soon.
Say no words out loud.
But wrap your quiet arms around,
Hide us in your cloud.

Come wash away this awful stain,
And let this place be clean.
And bring the fairest flowers to meet
The evil we have seen.

A little lower than the angels
We were born to be.
Yet which of all the creatures
Knows this misery?

~original words by Shawn Kirchner

(Alternate words for stanza 2, available in the published version:

Come wash away our grief and pain,
And let our hearts be clean.
And bring the fairest flowers to meet
The sorrows we have seen.)