Our Mother's Heart (song)

‘Our Mother’s Heart’ was commissioned in 2020 by composer and broadcaster Andrew Ford for his secular hymn sequence 'Red Dirt Hymns', featuring settings of lyrics by Australian poets. Our Mother's Heart' is a matrilineal and eco-poetical reimagining of the doctrinal hymn ‘Of Our Father’s Heart Begotten’, an adaptation of the Latin poem ‘Corde natus ex parentis’ by 4th century Roman poet Aurelius Prudentius Clemens. Roby Furley Davis’s early 20th century translation of the ‘Corde natus’ appears in 'The English Hymnal' (1906). It contains the choric refrain “evermore and evermore” and the line “sea and forest, frost and zephyr”, both of which are reproduced in ‘Our Mother’s Heart’. This is a praise-song not for a god, but for a Mother Earth.