‘They only shoot the birds that cannot sing’
I heard Noah Kahan’s “The Great Divide” on SNL.
Honestly it’s a variant of Dawes’ “All Your Favorite Bands” to me.
But there’s always room for two great songs in my world.
“You know I think about you all the time
And my deep misunderstanding of your life
And how bad it must have been for you back then
And how hard it was to keep it all inside.I hope you s?ttle down, I hope you marry rich
I hope you’re scared of only ordinary shit.
Like murderers and ghosts and cancer on your skin
And not your soul and what He might do with it.”
I think of my grandmother who, despite being let down repeatedly by the Catholic Church, wanted to be buried with her rosary beads.
I think of my mom, who I thought I understood until I had to live without her.
Back then, I sometimes (often) thought she didn’t have the life experience to weigh in on some of the shit that was vexing me.
Truth always was, she had an incredible way of interpreting things from outside of them.
Yet she never realized her own value. So maybe that’s why I didn’t always see it, either.
“They only shoot the birds who cannot sing
And I’m finally aware of how shitty and unfair
It was to stare ahead like everything was fine.”
She could “sing” just fine.
But no one — doctors, dentists, men, maybe even her own parents — listened.
“Did you wish that I could know
You’d fade
To some place
I wasn’t brave enough to go?”
I listened more than most.
I really did believe in her more than she ever did herself.
I still wait for her to come back to me like she promised.
To this day, I remain stunned that she hasn’t yet found her way back.
Or at least that I can’t pick up on it if she has.