Shackles are heavy on the wrist
Stacked like sardines, belly of a ship
Live in your own piss and shit and being seasick
Cracked across your back with a thick leather whip
Salt water burns through your wounds
Women are starving with babies in their wombs
On your hands and knees trying to cry God please
Exhausted your voice is too weak to speak
Neighbors and strangers are dying beside you
Their decaying bodies you're tied to
Cling tight to your fight for survival
Wonder if your tribe will ever try to find you
Arrive somewhere strange, the air is cold
You can see your breath and you're barely clothed
Your first time ever seeing snow
Sleeping next to it on a hard dirt floor
Go from can't seeing see in the morning to can't see at night
You work till your hands bleed white
Your native language you can't recite
Murdered on sight if you try to read or write
When you bend all of your life and can't see the light
It get's painful to stand upright
Right?
And your eyes bear the sight of your wife
Being being pulled from your shack and brutalized at night
You only taste joy when babies are born
Which becomes an occasion to mourn
Separated, torn from your celebrating arms
Then as quickly as they came they were gone
Sold away from your farm this is all they've known
Never heard stories from home
They forget your name T
The culture from which you came
Teaching it'll get you slain.
Praying to your god will get you the same and tortured to near death lest you complain
No Choice left you sing through the pain and pray that your suffering wasn't in vain
End of your chain, end of your life
Your grandchildren born with no end is sight
So you muster up all of your might
And your last breath comes out, fight
This is actually true
Now stop and imagine that's you
Now stop imagining unravel the truth and ask just who is it happening to
Everything that the passenger do
The driver experience too
So if humanity is one
Then we all get burned when it's hell that we're traveling through
[Chorus]
You've got to save my soul
Put me back together make me whole
Said we don't know which way to go
Take my hand and place me on that road
Trapped in a history we don't understand
Can't remember how this blood got on our hands
Never been taught about the ugly past
Expecting God not to punish man
Our ancestors brought us control
We realize now that the cost was our soul
Got me feeling like an empty shell
Prison guard that inherited a cell
I'm desperate to find my place
Emptiness lies behind my face
Flowers only die in a vase
A heart only dies encased in a lie we call race
I hear the song but I can't sing along
Something's really wrong I can't put my finger on
Terrified to admit it's wrong
Cause I'm hiding in the ruins of a legacy that still lives on
Our identity is hinged upon the miserable myth we've been caught since we're born
Until we mend what was torn
The debt of a sin lingers long after the victim's moans
This is actually true
Now stop and imagine that's you
Now stop imagining unravel the truth
And ask just who is it happening to
Everything that the passenger do the driver experience too
So if humanity is one then we all get burned when it's hell that we're traveling through
[Chorus]
---
The Travelers - Brother Ali
