Album: The August Engine (2003)

The Trial And The Grave


Was it a dream?
Was it in Hell?
What is the difference?
I scarcely can tell
Is it just I
Or the world
That's gone mad?
This Vision insane, I'll explain, that I had...

Mourning for something
Something I've never known
I Search for a headstone
A Plot with a marker
But what did I find
In time?
Nothing but a blindness inside
And golden birds in the clouds of my eyes

Then a ghostly waif did arrive
And demanded:
"Who will love or listen to me now?
What lost urchin searches for my poor disfigured ghost?"

And so a Grave I did find
In time
Not one of the dead
But voices echoing in my head
They said:

Standing condemned
The trial commenced
None to defend her and no evidence
Vaguely aware Of her hands in their chains
Heedless of all that the chamber contained

The sentence was passed
The barristers laughed
When they had killed her they cut her in half

When golden birds flew
Out from her severed halves
They trapped them to sell to the gathered riff-raff

All the ghosts had gone unnoticed there
They haunted
Every corner of the court and
Outside in the square they waited

Golden feathers now in their tin cages
Waving farewell to the shades as they brought her to

This place where only memories can breathe
She sits sewn together and scarcely bereaved
Unheard she sings an unearthly lament
And no one on earth seems to know where she went