Album: Cassadaga (2007)

Four Winds

Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe
There's people always dying trying to keep them alive
There's bodies decomposing in containers tonight
In an abandoned building where
Squatters made a mural of a Mexican girl
With fifteen cans of spray paint and a chemical swirl
She's standing in the ashes at the end of the world
Four winds blowing through her hair

But when great Satan's gone... the Whore of Babylon...
She just can't sustain the pressure where it's placed
She caves

The Bible's blind, the Torah's deaf, the Qur'an's mute
If you burned them all together you'd get close to the truth still
They're pouring over Sanskrit on the Ivy League moons
While shadows lengthen in the sun
Cast all the school and meditation built to soften the times
And hold us at the center while the spiral unwinds
It's knocking over fences crossing property lines
Four Winds, cry until it comes

And it's the Sum of Man slouching towards Bethlehem
A heart just can't contain all of that empty space
It breaks. It breaks. It breaks.

Well I went back by rented Cadillac and company jet
Like a newly orphaned refugee retracing my steps
All the way to Cassadaga to commune with the dead
They said, "You'd better look alive"
And I was off to old Dakota where a genocide sleeps
In the Black Hills, the Badlands, the calloused East
I buried my ballast. I made my peace.

Heard Four Winds, leveling the pines

But when great Satan's gone... the Whore of Babylon...
She just can't remain with all that outer space
She breaks. She breaks. She caves. She caves.