Quote of the day, 1/11/07

By the time we're done with dancing,
elsewhere, darling, you'll be glancing
and the night's a river-torrent tearing us apart.
Merely melody entwined us,
easily the ties that bind us
break--
in fibrillations of the heart.
Don't cry out or cling in terror;
darling, that's a fatal error:
clinging to a somebody
you thought you knew was yours.
Dispossession by attrition
is the permanent condition
that the wretched modern world endures.

You drift away,
you're carried by a stream.
Refugee:
a wanderer, you roam.

You lose your way;
so it will come to seem:
No place in particular is home.

You glance away:
Your house has disappeared.
The sweater you've been knitting
has unpurled.

You live adrift,
and everything you feared
comes to you in this undoing world.

Copper-plated, nailed together,
buffeted by ocean weather,
stands the Queen of Exiles,
and our Mother she may be.
Hollow-breasted, broken-hearted,
watching for her dear departed,
for Her children cast upon the sea.
At her back,
the great idyllic land of justice
for exilic peoples
ponders making justice private property.
Darling, never dream
another woman
might have been your mother;
someday, you may be a refugee.

A refugee,
who's running from the wars.
Hiding from the firebombs they've hurled.

Eternally,
a person out of doors;
desperate in this undoing world.

Mother,
for your derelicted children
from your womb evicted,
grant us shelter, solace, harbor, solace, safety--
let us in!

Let us tell you where we've travelled;
how our hopes, our lives unravelled;
how unwelcome everywhere we've been...


--The Klezmatics, "An Undoing World," lyrics by Tony Kushner