After All
My niece (aka Miracle Baby) wrote and said she found a CD in her car with a song on it that put her in mind of me because she had just read my blog and caught up on mom’s crisis. The song is a Dar Williams song – I know Dar because she sings that great song All Men Are Liars, but this is a much more touching song, called After All.
After All
Go ahead, push your luck
Find out how much love the world can hold
Once upon a time I had control
And reined my soul in tight
Well the whole truth
It’s like the story of a wave unfurled
But I held the evil of the world
So I stopped the tide
Froze it up from inside
And it felt like a winter machine
That you go through and then
You catch your breath and winter starts again
And everyone else is spring bound
And when I chose to live
There was no joy
It’s just a line I crossed
I wasn’t worth the pain my death would cost
So I was not lost or found
And if I was to sleep
I knew my family had more truth to tell
So I traveled down a whispering well
To know myself through them
Growing up, my mom had a room full of books
and hid away in there
The father raging down a spiral stair
‘Til he found someone
Most days his son
And sometimes I think
My father, too, was a refugee
I know they tried to keep their pain from me
They could not see what it was for
But now I’m sleeping fine
Sometimes the truth is like a second chance
I am the daughter of a great romance
And they are the children of the war
Well the sun rose
So many colors, it nearly broke my heart
It worked me over like a work of art
And I was part of all that
So go ahead, push your luck
Say what it is you gotta say to me
We will push on into that mystery
And it’ll push right back
And there are worse things than that
Cause for every price
And every penance that I could think of
It’s better to have fallen in love
Than never to have fallen at al
‘Cause when you live in a world
Well it gets into who you thought you’d be
And now I laugh at how the world changed me
I think life chose me after all