The Price of an Orange

I was raised on stories of the death camps,

Tales of my peoples' pain,

Hard lessons of the Holocaust

Never let it happen again

Two thousand years homeless

We dreamed of a promised land

Now we're knocking down homes and olive groves

On Rafah's bloody sand

The tanks prowl the Gaza border

And soldiers in their sniper towers

Shoot so casually, and take a life

As one might pluck a flower

I came here to bring some healing

Though those soldiers are my kin

What border can I stand on?

Nahed smiled and took me in

CHORUS: What does it mean to have a home?

What does it mean to be free?

Maybe just to give a guest

Sweet oranges grown

From your own tree

Such a small thing to die for, so ordinary

Once children played in the orange groves

Picnicked by the oceanside

Now through dusty streets and rubble heaps

They dodge and laugh and hide

At night, Nahed's kids do their homework

Watch cartoons and the TV news

While bullets thud into pockmarked walls

Outside, where the tanks cruise

After a long night of shell shots

Bullet holes in window glass

Nahed feeds eggs to her children

And sends them off to class

"These eggs are from my own chickens,"

Nahed says with quiet pride

When her walls fell to the bulldozers

I wonder if the chickens died?

(CHORUS)

I tried not to wake her the day I left

But she wouldn't let me leave unfed

She filled my pockets with oranges

She filled my hands with bread

I carried those oranges a long time

Finally ate them on a long night's ride

Back from one more desperate visit

To one more bloody bedside

They tasted sweet, those Rafah oranges

As an unsung melody

Sweet as welcome to a stranger

As a garden's memory

A woman stands and offers fruit

A gesture every gardener knows

From a ghost branch, from a ghost root

Home gone, and the border closed

CHORUS: What does it mean to have a home?

What does it mean to be free?

Maybe just to give a guest

Sweet oranges grown

From your own tree

What is the price of that orange?

How many lives for that tree?

Such a small thing to die for

So ordinary

Devachan Music (BMI)

Lyrics: Starhawk; Music: Mark Simos

info@songsofconscience.com

www.starhawk.org www.songsofconscience.com and www.devachan.com

Version 5 Last updated 8 March 2005

These lyrics and the underlying work conditionally released under a Creative Commons Music Sharing License

(creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed-music).

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