No More Shelter - Joan Shelley

Pull up the horses

And carry me back behind the lines

Back to the water

Back with the gardens and the vines

Where two hands of ashen gold

Chase down my fever

And wash me with soap

When half of us were losing

And half of us were wrong

A rose you planted

Leather and rope

Fire inside the rock

The heavens open

I am like a child on the spot

Asking God why’d you come?

Was it all for some glory?

Was it all for a song?

And my eyes are still searching

For a light in the fog

A sweetheart to sing for me

I was thrown from the center

Where I once so bravely spun

I was pulled through the colors

Through the colors did I run

And my eyes were wide and gleaming

Though wind-whipped by the storm

There is no more shelter for the broken

I hear they still track me now

Dogs try to sniff out my home

I’ll write you in the scars

Laid in trails by the jets headed home

How you mold me and move me still

I’m calling on your memory here alone in my cell

A time when you fed me, a time I was filled

But one of us must keep from crying