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Before We're Born

from Blood & Sand by Jade Sylvan

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lyrics

I grew up in two rooms.
Never was a genial daughter.
Met an old woman when I turned thirteen.
She said you know you don’t have to sink in water.

So I left my house with its basketball net
and I set out for the ocean.
All the rocks had faces and the trees had hands
and the fields were screaming for devotion.

Is this seeing?
Is this growing?
Is this a circus show?
Is this a bad porno?
Is this a sweet plateau?
Do we ever really know?
Is this living
If we’re dead before we’re born?

I’d read once, “Listen to the river.
There’s constancy in its flow.”
So I asked it all my questions,
but it just babbled, then had to go.

Now, I never was raised religious
though I’ve long been searching for the call.
Once I asked the devil for forgiveness,
but he was busy staging the fall.

Is this seeing?
Is this growing?
Is this a circus show?
Is this a bad porno?
Is this a sweet plateau?
Do we ever really know?
Is this living
If we’re dead before we’re born?

By the time I turned twenty
my hair tumbled to my knees.
I could name the stars all backwards
I could drink the boiling seas.

I watched as swollen cities
were leveled to the ground
and I bathed inside that silence,
that holy lack of sound.

credits

from Blood & Sand, track released April 5, 2011
written by Jade Sylvan.
geetar and vox by Jade Sylvan.
strings by Jonathan Cannon.
percussion by Zach Nazar.
produced by Lee Wizda.

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all rights reserved

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about

Jade Sylvan Somerville, Massachusetts

Jade Sylvan is a poet-turned-songwriter living in Somerville, Massachusetts. She fled her native Indiana shortly after graduating college to pursue dreams of becoming a writer. After getting her first book of poetry published and touring the country in 2009, she came home and began writing songs, which garnered instant attention in the famed Cambridge folk scene for their lyrics and melodies. ... more

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