Album: The Open Road (2010)

Homeland

Well, I jumped so high
Knocked the table over
Thought I saw a ghost
Come out of the clover
She lived in this house
Forty odd years or so

She was buried in the back
With the English and the natives
Slaughtered like sheep
Women and babies
A lot of blood and tears
Three hundred years ago

It's like they're caught up in the trees
In the webs of spiders
Spun out of leaves
Ghostly riders
Lookin' for a trail
To find their way back home

But there's nothing back there or tomorrow
No place they can put their sorrow
Heavy as death
Cold as a broken stone

And I call this place my homeland
And I claim this land I own
But it belongs to another people
They possess it in their bones

Well, I can hear them in the night
Like a hundred televisions
Hummin' down low beneath the subdivisions
All they really want is if we can hear 'em now

They been troublin' this plain
Looking for attention
Making crazy tracks
They need an intervention
All they really want
Is to get back home somehow

So build up a fire
Say a little prayer
Cook a little meat
Pull 'em up a chair
And offer them a plate
Maybe we can all find peace

You can't bury anything, men or nations
Old memories, old vibrations
The pain doesn't stop just because the killing ceased

And I call this place my homeland
And I claim this land I own
It belongs to another people
They possess it in their bones

Well, I jumped so high
Straight up off the bedsheet
Nightmare sky
Bloody with the red heat
Started to shake
Cause I couldn't find my way back home

Well, I landed in the ditch
Landed in the gutter
Landed in arms of my long lost mother
Cryin' like a child
While the Bayou Pierre groaned

And I call this place my homeland
And I love this land I own
It belongs to another people
They possess it in their bones

Yeah, I call this place my homeland
And I claim this land I own
But it belongs to another people
They possess it in their bones