Work Text:
Verse 1
The television snow is falling blue,
Names crawl past like freight at night.
A woman sets her bundle down—
a scythe gone dull in winter light.
She pins a note to the city gate:
“Closed for conscience, closed for grief.
I’ve counted bones until I broke—
I’m walking off this killing shift.”
Chorus
Death is on strike tonight,
She won’t punch in for your holy fight.
No flag, no prayer, no marching band
Can make her take another life.
Death is on strike tonight—
Hear the gates of mercy creak.
If even Death can feel such shame,
What’s wrong with you and me?
Verse 2
Foremen in their uniforms
stamp forms stamped over hearts.
They talk in quotas, tonnage, yield,
call bodies “figures,” call blood “parts.”
She folds her union card in two,
lays it under candle flame:
“I will not reap what you have sown,
I will not tidy up your shame.”
(Chorus)
Verse 3
They hired a man with metal hands—
no face to pale, no eyes to weep.
He answers to a different name,
works double-time, does not sleep.
Not death, but something colder still,
that does not knock, that does not pray;
Annihilation, strikebreaking scab,
paid by the hour, paid by the day.
Refrain
Oh, Death is on strike tonight,
and the scab keeps time like a drum;
Where pity might have turned her head,
the engine simply hums.
Verse 4
Mothers press the darkened glass,
Hospitals breathe in fluorescent time.
A desert wind learns every hymn,
and still can’t carry home each child.
She sits outside the union hall,
hands black with centuries of dust—
“Return the names you took from me,
or leave them be, and learn to love.”
(Chorus)
Bridge
Picket lines around the moon,
lanterns swinging over seas;
Lay your weapons, lay your words,
let the wounded finally breathe.
Count the living, learn their names,
teach your trembling hands to feed;
If you must march, then march to mend—
not to make another need.
Verse 5
At daybreak, church bells test the air;
No tally rings, no ledgers sing.
She buttons up her working coat,
but keeps the scythe against the spring.
“Call me back when hunger’s done,
when power loosens up its jaw.
Until then, let the living speak—
and let your mercy be the law.”
(Chorus)
She turned the hourglass on its side,
and sand forgot to fall