The Promised Bride

Octuneber day 6, a telling of the story of the promised bride from the silt verses

Lyrics:

A woman comes down to the water’s edge
Down to the river comes she
Says “There’s no where so lonesome as the river’s edge,
And no woman more lonesome than me

And back in her home waits a long white veil
There lays her wedding dress
The promised bride comes wild eyed
Down to the river’s edge

A woman hopes by the waters edge
That her end might come to set her free
The woman look o’er the river’s edge
And into dark water she weeps

Oh sing of flesh and silt
The tide rises as it will

The woman peers past the water’s brim
Down Into the river stares she
Down into the garden of the trawlerman
There at the bottom stands he

And there in the garden turns the trawlerman
To show her the first face that speaks,
“My dear, my dear” asks the trawlerman
Why have you come here to weep?

And the woman who stands at the water’s edge
Tells him the cause of her pain
“Tomorrow, the day of going forth,
Tomorrow is my wedding day”

“But I cannot fit into this life they’ve made
This thing I just cannot be.
Bound in the shape of this path that’s been laid
Out by my family”

Oh Sing of flesh and silt
The tide rises as it will

He listens well, with his second face
And then again he turns to speak
“Come down in the river be made again,
And this thing you shall never be”

“For flesh is soft as silt and mud
And my currents strong and kind.
Come down in river, be made again
Into something that they cannot bind”

The bride she says “I am afraid
I have seen what comes in on your tides
You will make a horror of me
A thing that I cannot abide”

Oh sing of flesh and silt
The tide rises as it will

The trawlerman laughs “will your flesh not break?
Your hands crack? Your lungs burn?
Will they not make a horror of you
In the life they bid you return?”

“For god or for man a vessel I’ll be,
Can there be no other path?”
“A vessel you are, and a vessel you’ll be”
So said the Trawlerman

To the garden comes, the promised bride
Grasping his outstretched hand
And as she sinks with one face
Smiles the trawlerman

Oh sing of flesh and silt
The tide rises as it will

A bridegroom at the altar waits
A bridegroom waits alone
For his promised bride to come
There to the chapel of stone

And as the moments drop like flies
The groom begins to fear
He shall not see his promised bride
He hopes to hold so dear

“They’ve played a trick” the bridegroom thinks
“A fool they’ve made of me”
But then the first of his wedding guests
In the distance he does see

Oh sing of flesh and silt
The tides rises as it will

The angels march upon him then
Weeping rivers of silt
Bodies wrapped in mottled shells
Upon legs as high as stilts

Then they part for the promised bride
And the bridegroom he does see
His promised bride, with pinchers bright
A creature from the deep

The water and silt come to meet him then
As his brides claw pierces bone
He falls and thus the river
Makes of his lungs a home

Oh sing of flesh and silt
The tide rises as it will

An angel comes down to the water’s edge
Down to the river comes she
An angel remade in the currents grip
In the currents remade was she