Afterlife
We can kill off the Earth's population
so many times over, it makes you wonder
which country will be the first to succeed,
and we're driving the fish and wildlife
to extinction at an exponential speed.
Some people show their belief in God
as they hold hands and pray out loud.
They seem to think He looks down and smiles,
saying “I'm so glad I made them.
They make me so proud.”
I believe in God and I know that when we die,
we'll have questions to answer.
I think the first one will be “why?”
“Why did you kill off the planet?
Did you get some sort of delirious high
to desecrate my creations, the earth and the oceans?”
And we'll answer “it wasn't me. It was someone else.
I'm just one person. I couldn't stop it.”
And God will ask, “Did you try?”
Freedom
It seems constant;
in the background, but ever present,
no matter what we do or say or feel.
It does not weigh heavily on our consciousness,
but it's there, nonetheless,
and we do not doubt it's real.
But when it somehow diminishes,
changes shape, begins to fade away,
then our minds become aware that it differs in form,
so we scream that we want it always to be there, to prosper,
to live on and on and on,
for Freedom is something we don't always appreciate
until we notice that it's gone.
The Lady in the Harbor
Where do the huddled masses go
when they're no longer tolerated here?
And the poor? The oppressed?
No one cares, I guess, if they vanish in the night.
The only immigrants we seem to want now
are the educated, the rich and the white.
The Lady in the Harbor doesn't understand
She stands in welcome, as she always has,
a symbol of the freedom we've shared.
But that was before. Now, times have changed.
If you're dark or you're poor, or a dreamer,
you just might be running and scared.
Now, the Lady is sad, with a loneliness
like she hasn't felt in years.
When the photography's ended,
and the tourists have all gone away,
she waits, hoping for clouds to come,
for fog to end her day.
However unhappy she is right now,
about what is happening here,
Liberty still lives today. It's tomorrow that she fears.
With the fog, comes release as she holds her torch high.
If anyone sees her now, they won't think it's tears,
just rain, falling from the sky.
