I have undone this distance so many times before That it seems as if this life of mine is trapped between two shores As the little ones grow older on the station platform I shall undo that distance just once more My brothers and my sisters have been scattered in the wind Dressed in cheap horizons which have never quite fitted And for centuries they've traveled on a pale phantom ship Sailing for that shore which has no other shore And they sing in Zulu From their hands leap the buildings, from their shoulders bridges fall And they stand astride the mountains and they pull out all the gold And the songs of their fathers raise strange cities to the sky Where they did not belong and could not belong And they never knew why And they share with the swallows all their winters and their hopes
But often they get lost between the highways and the stores And the rivers of the homelands murmur in their dreams They're shackled to that distance till heaven lets them in And they sing in Zulu again Well they could not read and they could not write, and they could not spell their names But they took this world in both hands and they changed it all the same And from whence they came and where they went nobody knows or cares Cast adrift between two worlds, they could still be heard to say: I have undone this distance so many times before That it seems as if this life of mine is trapped between two shores As the little ones grow older on the station platform I shall undo that distance just once more And I sing in Zulu too