Song des Tages: High Wood

(Fish: "High Wood", erster Teil der "High-Wood-Suite", aus dem Album "A Feast Of Consequences", 2013. Der miese Sound ist youtube bzw. dem Uploader geschuldet - nicht dem Album.)

Chill, break of day, a light frost thawing,
Sun, pale and grey, a spectral morning.

Tractors crawl, the horsepower straining,
Carve the earth, the ploughshares turning.
The sod that hides where dead men lie,
the lost and fallen of wars gone by.

Gathering the iron harvest,
Reminders of their bloody madness,
Whose bones in furrows sometimes rise
To plead to be identified.

To join the ranks of comrade soldiers,
Buried beneath the bleached white crosses,
Names and numbers cut in stone,
The regiment they called their home.

The age they reached, the day they died,
Their memory is all that does survive,
In tended graves they rest in peace,
Their battle finally over.

The rolling trembling thunder rides the ridge of Bazentin,
Detonations scatter clouds of crows,
The tree line offers refuge to the wide eyed startled deer,
Launch, plunging through the bracken
They head into the shadows of the High Wood.

The oaks majestic standing proud and tall,
Holding their position on a landscape lost in time.
The roots dug in the sore contested ground,
The gnarled and twisted timbers betray the battle scars of yore.

The wood will rise, the wood will fall,
The circle is unbroken!
The wounds will heal in rings of time,
The circle is unbroken!

Half buried in the forest floor decay,
Broken rusting weaponry beneath the fallen leaves.
The shells that failed still hold their deadly load,
Dormant in the undergrowth their promise only stalled.

The wood will rise, the wood will fall,
The circle is unbroken!
The wounds will heal in rings of time,
The circle is unbroken!

In the darkness of the High Wood
It’s so dense I can hardly breathe,
A stark and muffled silence,
I stand alone amongst the trees.

Are these the ghosts or moving shadows,
Are these the spirits gone before?
Are these the restless souls still wandering -
The ones that were forsaken in the High Wood?



Anmerkung: Es geht in diesem wirklich großartigen Opus des Schotten Fish um die Opfer des Ersten Weltkrieges - es ist aber sicher nicht diesem Umstand allein geschuldet, dass der Sänger am Schluss des Songs zum Klang der militärischen Kriegstrommeln die vorletzte Strophe zusätzlich auf Deutsch rezitiert: "In der Dunkelheit des Hochwaldes ist es so dicht, ich kann kaum atmen; eine blasse und gedämpfte Stille, ich stehe allein zwischen den Bäumen."

"The circle is unbroken." Eben.