Waiting for the Fall

Helicopter missiles launch
The ground rumbles
Apartment complex shakes
Just before it crumbles
Children scream and die
Wrong time, wrong place
A woman wears a shawl
That hides the scar upon her face
A boy looks through a pool of blood
And prays to see the day
When the armies of the infidels
Will once more go away

And everybody’s just
Waiting for the fall
Outside the Green Zone
Through the machine gun turrets
On the other side of the wall

The lights go out again
The city swelters in the heat
A thousand ghosts are weeping
Amid the pockmarked street
No food in the markets
You can’t reap grain that you can’t sow
A no-man’s land the Red Cross
Doesn’t dare to go
A soldier shoots at everything
Acting like the master race
All the while wondering
What he’s doing in this place

Chorus

No gas in the gas tanks
Lines a mile long
A nation turned to rubble
Where everything’s gone wrong
Death squads roam the alleys
Looking for the eye
Of anyone who dares to say
A lie is just a lie
The torturers are torturing
In a prison cell
Flushing Korans down the toilet
Saying all praise be to Shell

Chorus

Humvee fires
Someone fires back
A sound that lets you know
You’re somewhere in Iraq
Surgeons with no medicine
Wonder what to do
And ask how things might be
If the outside world knew
And in an ivory tower in Texas
They’re toasting the New Year
Not knowing there’s a country
Far away from here

Chorus

“Waiting for the Fall” originally appeared on the Soundclick album, Waiting for the Fall (2005).  In 2006 it appears on the CD, Halliburton Boardroom Massacre.  That band version also appears on the 2009 CD, Waiting for the Fall — a Retrospective.  (I know, it’s confusing.)

I was reading Robert Fisk’s brilliant reporting about Iraq, and more or less turned one of his articles into a song.