Sentiment (White Feathers)

(album: Christ - The Album - 1982)

Feathers burn so easily,
The cat is blinded in the garden,
Last vision the lark is flame.
The cattle shed gives off the smell
Of sunday kitchen, the gentle eye,
The dispensable perfection.

Before the flash takes two weeks' food,
Pile the sacks of earth and hide.
All of us here know it, we grew it.
Fighting amongst ourselves,
Leaving bits of flesh on barbed wire,
A little blood on the floor.

Locks and bars across the door,
Well versed in violation,
Our children beat each other in the garden.
Our failure to accept the earth,
We talk of love but push it to the edge.
Push it to the edge.

This is no natural aggression
Composing death, I am afraid for beauty
When I see the fist, the perfect hand that turns
Against itself, the perfect hand
That holds a gun or wields a butcher's
Blade, or leads to death,

Leads to death the used-up bull
Or incarcerates the hopeless fool
Or takes the forest with a single flame
Leaves the nest an empty shell.
Human kind condemns the hunting beast
Yet their own choice leaves behind such ragged meat.

The military dream of blood, their sweet wine flowing in the veins of men who work towards our bloody end. They fly Enola gaily, give birth to this waiting... waiting, give us the reality of our hatred, give the earth nothing. Melting, goats dead on the green, dying lambs bleating by the wire... three last days on the earth, I lay down to die in the grass.