I awoke in the summer the sun struck the earth to furnish us with fire[i]. But jealous hands fashioned their cross to a sword[ii], brandished their gift as a torch to burn the light. "To the dead we owe only the truth[iii]" - the human condition[iv]. Surveying the space between the nave I saw my own infernal grave - existential imperfection[v].

We sat scrawling out notes on scratched oak tombs bullets bouncing off stonewall saints laid to rest by our Forebear[vi] 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[vii] could you make a way? Come down from that cross; hold out your hands so I can see[viii].
"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)[ix].


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[x]" 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.






Behind the Song:
[i] June 10, 1944, to be exact.


[ii] Reference to the Swastika
[iii] Voltaire


[iv] Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, and many others


[v] Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and many others


[vi] Jesus -- the origin of the Church


[vii] John 10:9


[viii] John 20:27-29


 [ix] A direct quote from the main character of this song, Madame Rouffanche, when she testified at a 1953 military tribunal in Bordeaux, France
[x] Sartre