Reprieve

Manhattan is an island Like the women who are Surrounded by children in a car Surrounded by cars Or Manhattan was a project That projected the worst of mankind First, one and then the other Has made its mark on my mind It's sixty years later Near the hypo-center of the A-bomb I'm in the middle of Hiroshima Watching a twisted old Eucalyptus tree wave One of the very few lives That survived and lives on Remembering the day it was suddenly Thousands of degrees in the shade And what all of nature gave birth to Terror took in a blinding ray With the kind of pain It would take cancer so many years just to say Oh, to grow up gagged and blindfolded A man's world in your little girl's head The voice of the great Mother drowned out In the constant honking Haunting the car crash up ahead Oh, to grow up hypnotized And then try to shake yourself awake 'cause you can sense what has been lost 'cause you can sense what is at stake Yeah, so it took me a few years to catch on That those days I catch everyone's eye Correspond with those nights of the month When the moon gleams like an egg in the sky And men are using a sense They don't even know they have Just to watch me walk by And me, I'm supposed to be sensible Leave my animal outside to cry But when all of nature conspires To make me her glorious whore It's 'cause in my body, I hold the secret recipe Of precisely what life is for And the patriarchy that looks to shame me for it Is the same one making war And I've said too much already But I'll tell you something more To split yourself in two Is just the most radical thing you can do So girl, if that shit ain't up to you Then you simply are not free 'cause from the sunlight on my hair To which eggs I grow to term To the expression that I wear All I really own is me Yes, to split yourself in two Is just the most radical thing you can do Goddess forbid, that little atom Should grow so jealous of Eve And in the face of the great farce Of the nuclear age Feminism ain't about equality It's about reprieve --- Reprieve - Ani DiFranco