Letter From Victoria

I’m the son of a man who never settled down

I left New York to find a Kansas town

I rambled far from everywhere that day

When your breath blew ’neath my wing and lifted me away

I walked up Highway 40 on my knees

A-burnin’ in your bright forbidding breeze

The old cathedral towers on the plain

No horse would drag me away, no car or train

The brothers of a new Jerusalem

Are waiting for me to be kin to them

A prayer, a meal, and sin are what we share

If we’re not family yet, we’re getting there

The harvest work was done before we came

We gleaned the fields and filled the night with games

A holy fool is welcome in this town

But a prophet gets no peace, just a thorny crown

You marked me with your arrow of desire

You pulled my brothers out of the lake of fire

Oh, get up, friends, the hour is getting late

And proclaim a jubilee at the market gate

The elders told me how it used to be

They’re sitting on the edge of eternity

If heaven is tomorrow’s earth today

In your kindness let me die, not fade away

Everyone knows everyone round here

They built the towns and watched them disappear

The city is the soul of who I am

There’s no room for you or me in dusty Bethlehem

There’s fire in the Rocky Mountain sky

In Florida the water’s getting high

The California hills are evergreen

And I’ll see my brothers there, with a God unseen.

***

Melody: "Abandoned Love," Bob Dylan

This song is a picture postcard from Kansas, a love letter to the spirit of God, and some kind of a love letter to the people, too. A young man formed by and saved in the city looks at a country town. It is an impressionist painting in words. It is a little journalistic. It is a blending of American folk lyricism and Hebrew poetry. It's literal and proverbial. It's ambiguous. It's definitely ambivalent. Maybe it's visionary, but I don't want to be bragging about things in which I have no right to boast. Most likely it's honest.