A City

The days are long and painful The nights are long and bare Those alleys, hard and brutal Between buildings built with care Springtime held a promise Its lilac on the wind Summer opened its hydrants To the many colors of kids The sky bled with the autumn The moon stabbed thru the eye Before too long, it's winter -- A city waits to die They came there by the thousands To work in grocery stores Left the pogroms of the Old World For the scent of something more But it's business as usual It's the same thing as before The same old anti-Semitism The same rotten, slamming door The sky bleeds with the autumn The moon stabbed thru the eye Before too long, it's winter When a city waits to die Here's your great-grandfather Unlocking his fruit truck at dawn His tree of knowledge, shaken The apples of his eyes, gone He'll fall prey to scavengers They're just like all the rest Who'd seek to exterminate his kind Just like virus, just like pests The sky bleeds with the autumn The moon stabbed thru the eye Before too long, it's winter And a city waits to die Hell hath no fury Like a city's scorn If you're on top, it raises you up On an altar, gilt and warm But if you're in the gutter, That's as high as you should aim 'cause that asphalt hunter will track you down Just like endangered game Yes the sky bleeds with the autumn The moon stabbed thru the eye Before too long, it's winter And now a city waits to die