"Sometimes I wish I wrote more songs, I don't write anywhere outside the studio. That's where it always gets done – going blindly into something. To me that's always been important. To go blindly into it."John Cale
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Lyrics
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.
Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.
About this song
Poem by Dylan Thomas. Part of the Christmas Truce music performance in Mesen (December 20, 2014).
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» Copyright notice
All lyrics by John Cale unless stated otherwise.
© Garnant Music
© John Cale Music BMI
© Garnant Music
© John Cale Music BMI
