New Model Army No Pain
Across the town on the other hill,
your lights glow from a different world.
You always found a place to hide - nails and cross to lay beside;
with all the ghosts that we denied.
Now, in rippled arcs across the sky, the great white birds of winter fly;
and the wheel turns, and people change - scattered ashes to the wind.
And there's no pain, there's no pain, there's no pain
A dry river in the blazing sun . . .
Your parched face and your callused hands,
Behind us lie the arid lands
To say too much - well, it was not our way,
and in the end there wasn't much to say;
the scars are healed now anyway
and there's no pain. . . a dry river in the blazing sun . . .
And Abraham rose, took his only son, and knife and tinder
in his hand, and setting out across the desert and up into
the scrubland hills, he bound the boy Isaac to the stone,
raised the blade and waited for the miracle.
But the wind blows silent across the hills, across the dead and the empty hills,
dead, like the god that never came,
like your face, the day that you turned away.
There's no pain . . . a dry river in the blazing sun . . .
