Verse 1

We drew the lines again on maps that weren't ours to keep

Piled stones on borrowed ground while the morning burned and wept

The gates went up at noon, the cameras turned away

We counted what was taken, made it count, and couldn't stay

Chorus

The protests rise like weather, like a tide that won't be named

We carry every refusal in the marrow, in the frame

Something lacerated in the square, the hall, the ordinary place

We gather up the defiant and the grieving, face to face

Verse 2

A mall, a temple doorway, a school's familiar corridor

Summer doesn't ask permission, but the violence always finds the door

We read the verdicts handed down for memory, for keeping vigil

Decades of withheld truths come through the phone — slow, civil

Bridge

Still the bodies wait for answers older than the charges

Still the vaccines race the fever through the darkened marshes

We are not the only ones who know what being refused means

We are not the only ones who've stood inside the in-between

The unresolved stays open like a window in a court

The world condemns, the door stays shut, the protest goes unheard

Chorus

The protests rise like weather, like a tide that won't be named

We carry every refusal in the marrow, in the frame

Something lacerated in the square, the hall, the ordinary place

We gather up the defiant and the grieving, face to face

Outro

We were here on a Saturday in summer

We named what we could name

We asked for an accounting

We asked, and asked again

Instrumental Outro

How did it make you feel?

A new song arrives tomorrow.