Come Back

From A Song To Deliver

Artwork by Gail Bradshaw

Song

Lyrics

By day I ask questions.
By night I learn.
If the soul seeks perfection,
How will the spirit return?

It was all so long ago now,
August crossed the sea,
Calling to the rose on the shore,
"Do not forget me."

In joy, in sorrow,
The light shines true.
The loves you lost
Will be found,
And come back to you.

Come back to you, to you,
Love come back to you.

Ah, that prince keeps calling me,
He got me up on the line, saying: "Praise."
He says: "I'm a soul king in Heaven."
I just said:"Please, please, please, please, please."
I'm a long way from home.
I'm a long way from the light.
I hear the beast breathing heavily.
He is watching every night.
In fear, in trembling, the light shines true.
The loves you lost will be found,
And come back to you.

Come back to you.
Come back to you.

I sing.

The loves you lost shall be found.
And come back to you.

Come back to you.
Come back
Come back
Come back to you.

Epilogue 

I don’t want to leave.

I just got here.

The sky is too blue, the water is too warm and the night will smell too sweet with jasmine and lavender.

Also, my heart is too full, my mind too empty, though thoughts do pass through, miniature memory bees buzzing home from the crimson field, laden with winter supplies in yellow bundles on their raspy legs.

And the towhees call from the yew, where are you, where are you, searching for their little grey child, not the one carried in the smiling lips of the secretive black cat, secured with her perfect white teeth, who also did not want to leave, but for this Summer’s first fuzzy test pilot.

Where are you? When will you leave?

Tonight, when the Buck Moon hypnotizes the deer in the field, standing as if made of moss and sand and cedar?
Or tomorrow, when the transformed Grand She Moon lumbers low over the Inlet, huffing and puffing on her way back to China?

Aloha. 

I understand why I do not want to leave.

Why do you want to stay?

Is it to watch once more that skittery black bat dance across the pearly sky, jerking its way through clouds of gnats, then in an impossibly graceful plunge, swoop low past the cedars and so near to our ears our membranes shudder and quiver from the cool cave breath spilling from its perfect hollow fingers?

Did you know bats and birds have the same gut biome? They must digest quickly or they will be too heavy to fly.

What they drop on us as they soar and flutter past is a concentrate so powerful we could run our whole world on it were we not so fascinated with digging, drilling and war.

Our failure is a good reason to leave, I admit, but I am making fine adjustments to my demeanour, to hide my murderous hominid from the silent village, and instead present as peaceful in my translucent bioengineered recyclable film.

If we could see through each others skin, maybe we would stop moving long enough to be real.

Long enough to heal.

Maybe not.

Today I do not want to leave.

Maybe tomorrow.

But there will be lizards in the beans, and snakes in the weeds, and hummingbirds to feed, and questions to ask, and stories to tell and wisdom to be shared and music to write, songs to sing, sorrows to be borne, yours and mine, and the whole shaking troubled world to comfort.

Foul dreams pollute the atmosphere,  pure dreams cleanse as pine and oak, sycamore and ironwood cure burnt land.



Come Back on Apparition Music