When we touch the world
And it falls away
When we feel like we're born
Just to fall apart

And our mother lies in state
And the broken pitcher glistens
And the snow is at the window
Making neither sign nor symbol
And the earth covers earth
And the mud lies in pools

Where the sand-dunes stretch unbroken
And the dry wind bends and sighs
And the geese are running harmless
And our desires are running wild
When we're looking at the smoke
That's rising from the incense
Neither coming here nor going
Neither heaven here nor hell
Neither borning here nor birthing
Neither dying here nor death

And we're wrapped inside our troubles
And we're wrapped inside our pain
And wracked with fires with longing
And our eyes are blind with night
With our fingers clutching coins
And our thoughts burning with 'I'
And our eyes cannot be sated
With the world and its nightmares
With the world and its dreams
Though later they'll be filled
With a small handful of dust
And the gods appear on altars
And we recognise their face
It's a face that we have carved there
And it's full of fear and longing
And promises and threats
But they neither stoop to conquer
Nor do they stoop to praise
And the mines are void of diamonds
That we carry in our rags

And all the world seems
A sadness song
All the world seems
A sad sadness song


Fourteen long years she lies oh she lies oh
And love as she lies she dreams in white stone
Colonnade marbled and balcony empty
A broken band brokenly marks broken time
Fourteen long years she dreams oh she dreams oh
As dreamer she dreams on, as lover entwines
Her limbs grow round his limbs, she drinks from a bottle
She walks through the city she's lost and then found
Fourteen long years, further back scattered
She sits on some beach and reasons with him
In the secret red moist heart, the most loved and most dark
The flame shaft and fierce dart, the rose-leaf and moss-part
Spreadeagled like starfish, most pain and most fear
Like flower of sea-grass, most fragile and harmless
Most fiery and bloody, most childlike and wrinkled
This starfish, this spider, most wretched and great
''Do not cry for me; let me show you the path
on which we neither come nor go''
She smiles at me lake-wide, wet-brown-eyed and dark-skinned
Some dark moon unmoved stalks through our loss
''Do not spend this night with me;
I shall make the fallen blind see''
This too another broken toy, from broken girl gift to broken boy
I ask my sea-blue rushing mother:
''Shall she hear the lions roar?''