SILENT PLANET LYRICS

1. Tiny Hands (Au Revoir)

I awoke in the summer the sun struck the earth to furnish us with fire.
But jealous hands fashioned their cross to a sword, brandished their gift as a torch to burn the light.
To the dead we owe only the truth - the human condition.
Surveying the space between the nave I saw my own infernal grave - existential imperfection.
We sat scrawling out notes on scratched oak tombs bullets bouncing off stonewall saints laid to rest by our Forebear at their children, at the dissidence of despair.
This proximal milieu could close the door to the closeness that keeps us inside the spaces that we hide.
My heart burns cold as life leaves my daughter's eyes.
I am the mother of the dying, the dust, the denouement.
How can absence take my father's house?
How can nothing take my daughter's life?
Walk me out from this tomb. If you are the gate could you make a way?
Come down from that cross; hold out your hands so I can see.

"Je suis sorti vivant du four crématoire.
[I came out alive from the crematory oven;]
Je suis le témoin sacré de l'église.
[I am the sacred witness from the church.]
Je suis une mère qui a tout perdu."
[I am a mother who has lost everything.]

This fire burns your name on my lips; this smoke chokes your song on my throat.
Now let death lynch my lungs I offer what's left of this withering tongue.
But oh, no exit so bright as the light that shines behind the Son.
I leapt through stained glass saints to fall to the garden where we first begun.

2. From Tides

3. Darkstrand (Hibakusha)

My hand, held to the glare of this burnt impasse. Yours, necessarily on the other side of some sickly meta-xis. You're stopped in stasis, matched with mine. I'll quantify time with meter, with rhyme to calculate a way to prove that you are alive.

Isolated, trapped between - a picture of you now stained on the street. Oh mother, teach me how to die. In your shadow I saw to a distant future. Your life was only a nominal fee. Singing the sound of silence, signaling the end. They took your life, mother, as a pretense to pretend. The hand that feeds us sat you down. Covered my eyes, thrusted the styli, retraced the timeline to call it suicide.

Will you wait for me?

Death was the chorus; our lives framed in refrain. Softly we sing notes better sung by our dead. I'd rather sleep and see you soon than die alone in the wake of this nuclear catastrophe. We were meant to create, you spoke us out of nothing. Out of the chaos we've caused, naked we came, shadows we leave.

Salt of the Earth: Preserve their songs.
Light of the World: Burn out the shadows.

Infinite echoes of stifled screams - the abyss you've created will ever stare back into me.

4. To Caves

5. Wasteland (Vechnost)

We "won the War"[i]; we made a temple to thieves enshrining the great criminal who promised heaven without God[ii].

If we had sight to seem to see the seven seas could cease to be or freeze in me. We'd shake this sudden sundering and subsequently cross the strait[iii] and traverse the wastes[iv]. We'll beat our rifles to shovels[v] and dig a proper grave for our sons who saw the end
of God[vi]: Wasteland. The flag will fall with the wall we built[vii]: Wasteland.

Apostate to the State, Witness to the Dead[viii]: For you know only a heap of broken Image[ix] and when you rid this earth of God we shall shelter Him underground[x].

Fall into the coldest wastes of humanity - darkening circles fed by deepening graves. "Death solves all problems[xi]," your heart is a statistic[xii]. No mother, no resistance... but still she precludes the grave.

They saw the end of God: Wasteland. The flag will fall with the walls we built: Wasteland.

[i] The Soviet Union "won" WWII on the Allied side of the conflict but suffered far more causalities than any other nation involved -- an estimated 10,000,000 soldiers and 10,000,000 civilians.
[ii] Joseph Stalin defied the spirit of Marxism-Leninism by taking on a persona of god-like qualities -- promising prosperity to his followers while exiling, executing, and starving large portions of his country.
[iii] Bering Strait
[iv] Siberia
[v] Isaiah 2:4
[vi] The USSR's attempt to rid the nation of God
[vii] Prophecy of the events of November 9, 1989.
[viii] The sacred witness, Lady Iulia de Beausobre
[ix] T.S Eliot, The Waste Land
[x] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
[xi] Joseph Stalin
[xii] "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of one million is a statistic." -- Joseph Stalin







SILENT PLANET LYRICS