An Undoing World - The Klezmatics

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 a 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 fire-bombs they’ve hurled;

Eternally a stranger out-of-doors

Desperate in this undoing world

Mother for your derelicted

Children from your womb evicted

Grant us shelter harbor solace safety

Let us in!

Let us tell you where we traveled

How our hopes our lives unraveled

How unwelcome everywhere we’ve been