Manhattan is an island
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Like the women who are
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Surrounded by children in the car
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Surrounded by cars
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Or manhattan was a project
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That projected the worst of mankind
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First one and then the other
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Has made its mark on my mind
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It's sixty years later near the hypo-center of the a-bomb
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I'm standing in the middle of hiroshima
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Watching a twisted old eucalyptus tree wave
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One of the very few lives that survived and lives on
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Remembering the day it was suddenly thousands of degrees
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In the shade
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And what all of nature gave birth to
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Terror took in a blinding raid
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With the kind of pain
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It would take cancer so many years just to say
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Oh to grow up gagged and blindfolded
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A great big mans world in your little girls head
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The voice of the great mother drowned out
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In the constant honking haunting the accident scene up ahead
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Oh to grow up hypnotized and then try to shake yourself awake
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Cause you can sense what has been lost
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Cause you can sense what is at stake
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Yeah it took me a few years to catch on that those days I catch everyone's eye
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Correspond with those nights of the month when the moon gleans like an egg in the sky
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And men are using a sense they don't even know they have just to watch me walk by
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And me, I'm supposed to be sensible, leave my animal outside to cry
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But when all of nature conspires to make me her glorious whore
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It's cause in my body I hold the secret recipe of precisely what life is for
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And the patriarchy that looks to shame me for it is the same one making war
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And I've said too much already but I'll tell you something more
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To split yourself in two is just the most radical thing you can do
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So girl if that shit ain't up to you, then you simply are not free
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Cause from the sunlight on my hair to which eggs I grow to term
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To the expression that I wear, all I really own is me
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I mean to split yourself in two is just the most radical thing you can do
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Goddess forbid that little adam should grow so jealous of eve
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And in the face of the great farce of the nuclear age
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Feminism ain't about equality, it's about reprieve
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Reprieve
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| Ani DiFranco |
