Yes I know
Well I’ve been here before
I can see how the darkness grows
Standing there
Against trees stripped-bare
And a sky that is blackened
By crows

Yes I know
Well I’ve been once or twice
To the point where it freezes
Fragile like ice
Leaving you standing
With your reason stripped-bare
Leaving you standing
No stranger
To fear

Dance me on
With this very broken song
Your Jerusalem rose
And you hair worn long

Reach to me
With these holes in your hands
Your body a book
None can understand


So sing now in silence
Cast yourself into the wind
It’s sullen and shaken and torn
And everything, everything
Everything’s gone

It’s a silence that will not bloom
Sewn by the seeds of our voice
It’s a word that has been lost
Lost to us now
In these desert time

So sing now in silence
Cast yourself into the wind
Its sullen and shaken and torn
And everything’s gone

It’s a silence that will not bloom
Sewn by the seeds of our voice
It’s a word that has been lost
Lost to us now in these desert time

Yes I know
Well I’ll been here before
I can see how the darkness grows
Standing there
Against trees stripped-bare
And a sky that is blackened by crows

Yes I know
Well I’ve been once or twice
To the point where it freezes
Over like ice
Leaving you standing
With your reason stripped-bare
Leaving you there
No stranger
To fear

Dance me on with your very broken
Song
Your Jerusalem Rose
And your hair worn long

Reach to me

With these holes in your hands
Your body a book

On your lips its command



Dance me on…..
Dance me on and on


This utterance is threefold
A prayer, a lament, and an exultation
A taste of honey on the tongue
Mixed with brambles:
Briars, brimstone and living bread

May these words go straight
Into the starry silence
Rootless, like a Russian thistle
Blown into the camps
That litter the night
Outside the city walls

You are the you called out for
And never received
But leading on
Streaming blindly
Thread-red into the
Winter night

From the stinging silence
That creeps over the rooftops
That is borne,
Like ash upon the wind
And steals across the
Sleeping houses

In the American twilight
The voices call forth:
O Polyphony
Of fallen forms

To the muted song
Of the sullen Danube
And the whispering
Of the Thames
As they sneak by,
Ghosts beside
Their estranged shores

To Tehran
And sad Jerusalem

To Western Sudan
Gaunt in her empty wilderness

To the television visions
Of a thousand unbroken walls
And the hands of children
Burning in the mouth of hunger

This utterance is threefold
And absolute in its impossibility
This entreatment
A sacrifice to silence

But in silence
Is their still song?

From where shall the light
Be drawn?

The temple is always torn
The rose rises
Chocked by briar and thorn
But God will
Again be born

Cast out beyond hope
The net of your voice
And speak madly
Against this Unrelenting wind…