1. |
Getme, Getme
05:16
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Gozlerin aldi meni
Kamande saldi meni
Getme, getme gel gözel yar
Getme getme gel
The forest quiet where’s its’ song
Will it return?
Derakhte zendegi poisoned
The earth too dry to hold us here,
But still we drink
Whose water we stealing?
Fires, we can’t control
Life, holding the thin rope
The borders rise
Ancient homes fall
The men in suits guarding their wall.
Where are you from? she said this ground
Then shot her down oh what a sound
I see four leggeds waiting, for someone to open gates
And secret seeds on earth that the heroes before placed
Gozlerin aldi meni
Kamande saldi meni
Getme, getme gel gözel yar
Getme getme gel
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2. |
Dam Comes Down
04:24
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It’s how the dam comes down and the salmon know the way
Or the birds will always open the day
Oh, can you take me to my place?
I want to go back to those days
Why’d they pull walls to our water
Darya of my blood left dried up
The birds don’t cycle there no more,
I tried to bathe again, but I’m stinging my skin on your shore
Oh, I don’t want to fall asleep
in the bars they wove around me,
I don’t want to pretend peace,
When I can hear the ghosts churning
How many wandered into places
told around the corner was redemption
broken hearts bowed to faulty prophets
Give their names for a promise left ungiven?
They let the people wait,
With saviors at the gate
And follow in the empty words
What other choice would they make?
When will life force them awake,
Reckon with the futures they take
If I broke the walls of this mirage
Would they realize they stand on blood
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3. |
Lost وطن (“Homeland”)
03:30
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Mama is a bird who
Flew over oceans to the beast
Rivers cried her name and left her hair braided with seeds
And baba ran away,
Somewhere over mountains he lost his heart
Any hint now tips him over
The ones whom he never called, in graves across the world
Starting a flood down his face
Oh lost vatan, take them
Remember,
Oh wealth of this nation
Are you freeing them? Are you freeing?
The old man arrived but he couldn’t kiss my face
Come back to where your roots grow
Beyond the empires gates,
Oh they’re the ones changing veins of lands we held so dear.
And cut the calloused hands
from where they buried their own raising again a home from this earth of bone
Oh lost vatan, take me
Remember,
Oh wealth of this nation are you
Freeing me are you freeing me?
Oh, my homeland far away
Oh in the loom we are woven, do we stay?
Hours escape here
Pour our sweat into lonely schemes
The golden view of amrika
Was never quite what it seemed.
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4. |
Crow Song
03:42
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Mountains of bones we loved
And whisper holy names with shackles in their palms
Unpromised lands of olive and turtle shell
Manifesting destinies with thorns in our wells,
The state is burning temples now
Prayers are up in flames with no rights to return
Bani adam as aye yek digaran
So where is the weaver in the throes of it all?
War tech made crops grow tall
But farmers getting poorer shipping food past the wall
Who owns the seeds they sow?
Oh, the barren earth that we once called home
Pouring red to the face
Of all things once free
The salt escapes in the wind
I just want to hold my babayi’s hand,
but the acid seeps into the sea.
So will you kiss your mother again on her face?
Bow to her sweet waters give thanks for her grace
Her soil made of loved ones who sing in your dreams
To join them one day soon when you dissolve into the breeze
And oh by god, with the force
Of her thousand streams
As they rush to flood what we’ve done
Will we really know how to mourn this one
Or keep forgetting until it's already done?
But I can still hear the crow sing
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5. |
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The wind was soft and palm fronds dancing, kissing the window you couldn’t cross —
They banned you from a land whose skin didn’t match their own.
Now, in the deportation room with the others, who only yearn to pray at the feet of their creator. Which prophet will come for us now, as yet another monster creates barricades around what is truly free?
Christian tour groups pass by. Over and over they come with bright eyes. they’re from Kansas or Utah. They want to walk where White Jesus once walked. The security guard, who sits at the arbitrary entrance to this arbitrary room, smiles at them. You aren’t allowed to stand.
The air is hot, and there are too many people here. The walls are plastered with images of places you will never get to visit. The banks of the dead sea, a plate of stolen foods they now call their own. The violence here is palpable. It is a hunger that hides in their mouths as they sneer at you.
The girl next to you, she hadn’t seen her family since as a child her mother had concealed her, to duck under the olive trees and barbed wire. I could feel her flailing roots, they were like mine. Searching for home as they hung in the dry wind.
Those orchards, she told me, had been burned now. But her grandfather was still there, terminally ill. “I just — wanted to try and see him”, she was in tears. The tears turned to heaving, and then she was in a panic. She made her way to the door, begging for help. “There are too many people.. I think I need a doctor..” The guards had been joking about something, they were relaxed, leaning against the wall, with their heads cocked sideways.
They stared at her as if she’s interrupted the most private of conversations. “Sit back down”. They say, “I am shaking”, she replies. They laugh, ignore her for a little bit, and then she faints. One guard rolls his eyes and pulls her from the ground. Thrusting her onto a chair with a vengeance I couldn’t understand. As if her limp body contained everything he’s ever hated in this world. A paramedic comes, and the whole time, the guards are taunting her. Calling her childish, threatening to take her to jail for causing a scene. The violence here is palpable. You can feel it in the ways they sneer. There is no winning when the laws were built to cut you in half.
Another man with no rights to return stands up in spite of it all, and passes chocolates around the room with a smile, “take one”, he offers with so much joy still in those eyes. This feels like home.
Deportation. They’re selling makeup in the duty free. wine and chocolate bars from all over the world. Bright ads flash in unison on giant screens that surround your eyes for new settlements in an ancient town. They’re giving it a name in Hebrew. (You can find it on google maps starting next week). Happy settlers posing in their happy white and blue pools, and that flag made of the two. While they smile, another child is shot. The camera clicks the same moment the trigger pulls, so the models can’t hear a thing.
Whose orchards were razed to build this throbbing heartache of a place?
And that interrogator who spat at you: whose repurposed home does he reside in now? What village lays in rubble under the new forest at the border of his yard?
Why was he so absolute that your feet may never touch this earth he calls promised? He clings to it with a story so flimsy, that only desperate violence can hold up its frayed edges.
Because, for him to exist, Palestine cannot.
His world is glossed in a lacquer of cement walls and barbed wire, of appropriated paradise. All scabs on something so ancient. But still the wind in the palms had been unphased, on the other side of that window. The leaves whispered sweet memories in a wind unbound by concrete fixtures and armed defenses. Dancing for a people whose hands calloused with a resistance they should never have had to bare, but whose hearts iron in the face of it.
So you fly back, and you know it's all the same. Men with rifles slung over their shoulders guarding borders that defy all the four legged and winged migrations that have kissed the earth for so long before colonizers erected their entitlement. But by the men who shake hands, passing cash behind closed doors, they become the judges who shoot bullets that are never held to account, somehow they build monsters out of earth. Implanting scabs one at a time, until the whole world is stolen and the earth eroded and barren, and we’re caught in it still, searching for home. But really, who could grow roots in soil turned to dust?
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6. |
Didn’t Run
02:02
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We didn’t run when the blue lights came for us
But sat under the willow tree
Weeping will you wait for us
Cause we’re taken while we sleep
I am a mocking bird on a blue day singing songs I heard long ago
A nostalgia for a home that I may never, never know.
We didn’t fall when they broke through the door
But kept the flame that was rising our bread
Our voices echoed in a child’s song
Whispered sweet words instead
And the metal that they tied on us,
Couldn’t shackle the songs in our dreams,
Every saint that disappeared in defending who they loved
Will guide us while we sleep.
Cause we’re stoking the sacred fire
As they still know our name
Even though we are tired
Stoking the sacred flame
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7. |
Dancer to your Flute
02:34
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Lying in the reeds of your sunset
I am the dancer to your flute,
Palms calloused and bathed in earth,
That’s how they like to look
Oh, that broken heart on your sleeve i just want to take care I would never tell
And the rage inside your bones
I just want to make space how the moon swells
You’re the type that has butterflies landing on your shoulder,
And the one whos singing in the streets to free the strangers
you shattered this sinless love and in the river I met my eyes
Saw I’ve loved too many times
reaching past my skin but
my wings won’t burn in the fire
Learn and let go, love and let go
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8. |
Hungry Man
04:02
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When will i know this body as my own again
From this table they took too much.
Hands of a hungry man still speaking over me,
Why is my story still tied to his gaze?
Ooh
Their lies are old
Ooh,
Motherland told
Ooh,
The freedom they gave
Ooh,
Just a cast that breaks
She couldn’t hold daughter closely
Dread the mirror in her eyes,
So the child grew with the scars on her back
Passed down since the first man took
Her skin as his own
Don’t let her crawl back to the place he said
She belonged.
Ooh,
Bless the woman
Ooh,
Who can’t discern her wings
Ooh,
Among the lies given
Ooh,
And other broken things
Take me to the mountain where we’ll feel safe
Take me to the river where we can bathe
Take me to the ocean where we can pray
So I’ll be free,
So I’ll be love
So I’ll remember where i came from
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9. |
Oh, this America
02:44
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Man in marble office
Dropped a missile on our heads,
He sits there laughing,
With a coffee in his hands.
Oh this America talk about big privilege,
Those things you say on screens
Throw your throne into the
Trash picked by children and
You are still arguing
Canceling imperfect,
Passport in your pocket.
Their crimes put fear in us,
With AJAX and Cointelpro.
This isolation is a tactic
Making ends meet on our own
Selfish cultures have us posing in the glass
Forgetting all life’s connected
The visionaries died for this,
Oh, what is this?
Oh this America talk about ignorance,
Fauna don’t know borders still you work in fortress,
Best things in life were free til they put price tags on
Clean water, air I breathe, lost life in the concrete.
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10. |
Undertow
03:15
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Here it comes the undertow
She waits until I’ve fallen
Crawling into what I know
To crack what’s been broken
What is it to let go of the life we dreamed of living?
Any moment she may come and there will be no more grasping.
It could be now or in a thousand days
Time comes and i’ll lose you either way
Oh it's just the truth of loving who … is mortal
Dust to dust that’s where we start
Is it where we’ll be going?
Cycle carries us all in the birth and the sinking
Do we fall back into the arms of our creator?
Please don’t let me end alone afraid of my soul’s taker
My soul’s taker.
Every night with open eyes
Mulling over endings where we will all lie
I long to know the songs to sing
When my spirit lifts`
from this body
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11. |
Stoking
01:46
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Stoking the sacred fire
As they still know our names
Even though we are tired
Stoking the sacred flame
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nēkajun Detroit, Michigan
صلح صلح صلح
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