River Don't Rise for the Righteous

The creek behind the church is running thick and strange today;

there's a film of broken rainbows where the children used to play.

The catfish are all belly-up, a silent, silver fleet,

and the air is thick with chemicals, both bitter and too sweet.

The farmers pray for rain, but the clouds are full of rust,

turning all their golden fields to consecrated dust.

They say it's just the season, say it's just a damn dry spell,

but we know they're selling off the water from the deepest well.

They sold the sky above us and the dirt beneath our shoes,

then they taught us how to sing a more convenient kind of blues,

where the villain is your neighbor and the poison is the cure,

and the only thing that's certain is that nothing is for sure.

And the river don't rise for the righteous, the sun don't shine for the blessed;

it just shines on the politician's smile and the cancer in your chest.

Yeah, the river don't care who is praying, it don't care who is good;

it just carries all the poison through your ruined neighborhood.

No, the river don't rise for the righteous, it just does what it's told

by the men who turned the water into stock that can be sold.

The trees are getting tired, you can see it in the leaves;

they're forgetting how to change now, like a widow who still grieves

for a world that had a rhythm, for a world that had a rhyme

before they started drawing their new maps on top of time.

They build their gleaming factories on sacred, stolen ground,

and the only thing that trickles down is the acid raining down.

We used to read the signs in nature, the birds upon the wire;

now the only sign we get is the color of the fire.

They sold the sky above us and the dirt beneath our shoes,

then they taught us how to sing a more convenient kind of blues,

where the villain is your neighbor and the poison is the cure,

and the only thing that's certain is that nothing is for sure.

And the river don't rise for the righteous, the sun don't shine for the blessed;

it just shines on the politician's smile and the cancer in your chest.

Yeah, the river don't care who is praying, it don't care who is good;

it just carries all the poison through your ruined neighborhood.

No, the river don't rise for the righteous, it just does what it's told

by the men who turned the water into stock that can be sold.

The land itself is speaking, but it's in a foreign tongue;

the dying of the bees, the silence in the young.

It's a ballad of betrayal, a slow and toxic fade

for the love of profit and the terrible trade.

And the river don't rise for the righteous, the sun don't shine for the blessed;

it just shines on the politician's smile and the cancer in your chest.

Yeah, the river don't care who is praying, it don't care who is good;

it just carries all the poison through your ruined neighborhood.

No, the river don't rise for the righteous, it just does what it's told

by the men who turned the water into stock that can be sold.