The Klezmatics play fun music that makes me want to happy dance. I did happy dance. You would too. Anyway, they are really more about music and sound than the lyrics, but these two songs have lyricy goodness. They are both really just poems, written by some one else, that were put to music. An Undoing World is amazing. It reminds me of Poe's "The Raven" in that it has such spotless meter and everything. Read it outloud. Or better yet, get the song.
"I'd Like to See" is very odd, but understandable, in kind of a twisted way. There's no anger in it. It's just odd. Back
Songs on this Page
An Undoing World
Es Vilt Zikh Mir Zen (translated from Yiddish)
An Undoing World
(words by Tony Kushner)
By the time we're done with dancing,
Elsewhere darling you'll be glancing
And the night's a river-torrent tearing us apart.
Merely melody entwined us,
Easily the ties that bind us
Break in fibrillations of the heart.
Don't cry out or cling in terror
Darling that's a fatal error
Clinging to a somebody you thought you knew was yours.
Dispossession by attrition is a permanent condition
That the wretched modern world endures.
You drift away, you're carried by a stream.
Refugee a wanderer you roam;
You lose your way, so it will come to seem:
No Place in Particular is home.
You glance away, your house has disappeared,
The sweater you've been knitting has unpurled.
You live adrift, and everything you feared
Comes to you in this undoing world.
Copper-plated, nailed together, buffeted by ocean weather
Stands the Queen of Exiles and our mother she may be.
Hollow-breasted broken-hearted watching for her dear departed
For her children cast upon the sea.
At her back the great idyllic land of justice
For exilic peoples ponders making justice private property.
Darling never dream another woman might
Have been your mother
Someday you may be a refugee.
A refugee, who's running from the wars,
Hiding from the fire-bombs they're hurled;
Eternally a stranger out-of-doors,
Desperate in this undoing world.
Mother for your derelicted
Children from your womb evicted
Grant us shelter harbor solace safety
Let us in!
Let us tell you where we travelled
How our hopes our lives unravelled
How unwelcome everywhere we've been.
Es Vilt Zikh Mir Zen
"I Would Like to See"
(words by Celia Dropkin)
i still haven't seen you
asleep.
i'd like to see
you sleeping,
when you lose your hold
on yourself, and on me.
i'd like to see you
helpless, feeble and mute,
i'd like to see you with your eyes
shut, see you breathless,
i'd like to see you
dead.
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