ذلك الرجل الغريب

I saw a dying child in your arms Like vapour exhaled by the earth doomed to arrive nowhere For in the darkness we must fall back on our woven seed And you'd think I would go to meet those primal beasts For I had such things to attend Strange witchcraft, with their drums and their dancing We could not understand because we did not remember The mind can do everything because of what is in it All of the past and all of the future Truth stripped of its cloak of time For the devil can be too much a devil to be fiend But most of us fall between fool and devil Not able to see the heavenly Earth So it's a standing place where we must endure All the sights and the sounds and the smell of rotting flesh No longing for the gallows between butcher and divine The empires of the future are the empires of the mind With no memories of coffins or the graves today Oh Empires of the mind Oh From envious uprising The squalor of life With blood through the ages As the world goes on and on Oh