Lyrics
Words in sequence
You loved me in the open, but not in the light,A half-whispered truth in the heat of night.In the sun, we’d pass like strangers do,But in your arms, the world felt new.They saw my skin and called it mistake,Said love like ours was a risk to take.But we carried it quiet, we carried it proud,Even when the whispers got too loud.I was copper and cream, your forbidden hue,A prophecy some feared would come true.In Lusaka, they’d see me as out of place,In Manchester rain, just another face.But love was our shield and also our chain,Sweet as wine, but it carried the stain.You kissed me deep, but I felt the divide,Every touch was a war we both denied.They said my blood was a map of the crime,Drawn by hands that erased the time.A child of two worlds that never agreed,Born of the want and the power’s greed.Yet you traced my scars like a secret code,Found beauty in the pain my history showed.I wondered if love could rewrite the page,Or if it too bowed to the empire’s stage.We walked through St. Louis on redlined streets,Saw the same lines back home repeat.Jim Crow shadows in Soweto’s dust,The same cold eyes that refused to trust.Our love felt older than we could tell,Carved in the same stone where our fathers fell.But you smiled like dawn through the heaviest smoke,And I breathed it in, though I knew I’d choke.They called me symbol, they called me sin,Couldn’t see the person beneath my skin.You called me home, though the house was cracked,Every wall a memory the past attacked.I tried to believe we could outrun fate,Write our own lines on a clean new slate.But every kiss carried the weight of proof,That even love bends beneath the truth.Still, I held on like the flag to the pole,Though the wind was tearing the fabric whole.You loved me loud when the doors were closed,But love outside is the love they opposed.In your eyes, I saw what could be done,The merging of rivers into one.But in the world’s eyes, we were still apart,Two nations at war in the same small heart.So I speak this now as the night leans in,Love isn’t free when it’s weighed by skin.It’s a fire that warms and burns the same,A truth too big for a lover’s name.I’ll walk from your arms when the dawn appears,With my pride intact and my heart in tears.Some loves are sweet, but the sweetest ones hurt,And leave you with ashes mixed in the dirt.They said my blood was a map of the crime,Drawn by hands that erased the time.A child of two worlds that never agreed,Born of the want and the power’s greed.They called me symbol, they called me sin,Couldn’t see the person beneath my skin.I wondered if love could rewrite the page,Or if it too bowed to the empire’s stage.