There’s a smoke cloud
Hanging over the shore
Staining the blue sky
A wispy orange gray
It screams silent but loud
Shaking me to my core
As I lift my eyes
Throughout the day
How can I sing
My usual songs
Of exile and love
Of redemption and faith
In a time when all things
Are twisted and wrong
And while floating above
Is that ethereal wraith.
There’s a death pall
Not blocking the sun
Not obscuring the summer
But coloring the air
I hear voices call
All screaming as one
But too many to number
As I offer a prayer
And I keep driving toward
The place I need to go
But perversely aroused
I stop and I stare
And while I must move forward
Steady, however slow
I keep looking at that cloud
And I think of how it got there.
Now the sun has gone down
On this day without sense
But the cloud still drifts
And floats on high
It hurts and astounds
To speak in past tense
But the present shifts
In the bat of an eye
And when the dawn comes
The screen may have faded
Its malevolent stain
Replaced by the shine
Of a new morning sun
The smoke dissipated
But the image will remain
Forever burned in my mind.
©2002 The Hesh Inc./Reality Shock Music
The song is my response to the events of September 11, 2001. I don't think anything more needs to be said beyond my feelings expressed in the lyrics.
The lyrics came first, two days later. My first attempt at a song came out stilted, as I tried writing about the actual events, so I shifted gears and wrote about how I felt about it using the smoke cloud as the main image and metaphor. The following weekend I recited the lyrics, sans melody, at a gig in Asbury Park. The music came sometime within the next few months, as my musical partner Izzy Kieffer and I decided that we needed to include a song about 9-11 in the album we had been busy recording throughout the previous year. We had already finished the tracking and had begun mixing, but we decided to hit the pause button on the mix until we had tracked this song. We came up with the music by taking a song from our previous band's setlist and tweaking it a bit. This was the result.
Listen to the song here: