Jubilee Lyrics

(music and words: Natalie Merchant)

  He fills the flower vases, trims the candle bases, takes small change from
the poor box. Tyler has the key. He takes nail and hammer to tack up the
banner of felt scraps glued together reading, "Jesus Lives In Me." Alone in
the night he mocks the words of the preacher: "God is feeling your every pain."
Repair the Christmas stable, restore the plaster angel. Her lips begin to
crumble and her robes begin to peel. For Bible study in the church basement,
hear children Gospel citing, Matthew 17:15. Alone in the night he mocks the
arms of the preacher raised to the ceiling, "Tell God your pain."
  To him the world's defiled. In Lot he sees a likeness there; he swears this
Sodom will burn down. Near Sacred Blood there's a dance hall where Tyler Glen
saw a black girl and a white boy kissing shamelessly. Black hands on white
shoulders, white hands on black shoulders, dancing, and you know what's more.
He's God's mad disciple, a righteous title, for the Word he heard he so
misunderstood. Though simple minded, a crippled man, to know this man is to
fear this man, to shake when he comes. Wasn't it God that let Puritans in
Salem do what they did to the unfaithful?
  Boys at the Jubilee slowly sink into brown bag whiskey drinking and reeling
on their feet. Girls at the Jubilee in low-cut dresses yield to the caresses
and the man-handling. Black hands on white shoulders, white hands on black 
shoulders, dancing, and you know what's more.
  Through the tall blades of grass he heads for the Jubilee with a bucket in
his right hand full of rags soaked in gasoline. He lifts the shingles in the
dark and slips the rags there underneath. He strikes a matchstick on the box
side and watches the rags ignite. He climbs the bell tower of the Sacred 
Blood to watch the flames rising higher toward the trees. Sirens wailing now
toward the scene.