This Lyric is: #209

Night Blindness
David W. Matheson (c) 2000

As growing cold and twilight mark
One more day you failed to win,
The broken bench and crowded park
Press the empty space within.
With every weary length you pace
Across your shrinking cage,
You spend the needed strength to face
The bars of helpless rage.
Hunger behind stress
Turns to night blindness.

The hawker with a cure to sell
Parades with well-trained beasts.
As shadows swell, you cannot tell
Who wears, who holds the leash.
They call you to a stronger plan.
Banners wave to feed the chill.
Ethnic cleansing, pride of clan,
Words to wash the blood they spill.
No room for kindness
Seen from night blindness.

Should the prophets' spell be broken,
You find yourself still fenced
By the only question spoken,
"Are you for us or against?"
So you learn to be forgiven
By your mirror when you say
That the only choice you're given
Is which friend to betray.
The old ties bind less
Under night blindness.

You torch the windmills that you win
And clap to their throes of death.
You don't see the dragons watch and grin,
Though they warm you with their breath.
Is it the Yankees or the Soviets?
Is it the Moslems or the Jews?
When your fingers fix like bayonets
It's the easy prey you'll choose.
Fail your like-kind test,
Fall to night blindness.

As the smoke clears above the trench
To let the moonlight filter through,
Flicker across the bed of stench,
Reflecting faces you once knew,
Spent and torn, you await the sun,
Left with no clear path to flee
The thief into whose arms you've run
To dodge the shadow of a tree.
So hard to find rest
Past your night blindness.

To forget the past condemns you
To relive it, so it's well known.
You push these lessons out of view
To fight for every cast-off bone.
We rise to offer prayers and rhyme,
Swear off apathy and hate
"Never again", 'til the next time
There's too little on our plate.
How far behind us
Is this night's blindness?



[This message has been edited by blakeh (edited 09-01-2002).]