Chapter 01 · 3 min 38 sec
Black Sun Rising
The lifelong question — searching for meaning that was always already there.
Lyrics· 253 words
[Verse 1] Four-thirty and the sky won't turn blue Smoke from the mill sits where the light should come through I've watched this same field swallow my mother's hands Watched it take my father standing where he stands
[Call/Response] Is the sun coming up? (No, it's burning black) Do we run from the heat? (No, we don't look back) Is the ground still ours? (Every inch we crack) Will we leave this place? (Not while we got that)
[Verse 2] They said a black sun means the harvest dies I said a black sun means I open my eyes Thirty years of ash and I'm still standing tall Let it scorch the fields, I won't scorch at all
[Chorus] Black sun rising over the dust and the wire I was born in the heat, I was raised by the fire You can take the green from every field I own You can't take the burning, the burning's my own
[Verse 3] My grandmother sang this on a porch gone gray Same three notes to start a brand new day I don't need a steeple, don't need a bell ringing true Just this dirt, this sun, and the work I do
[Bridge] Let it scorch — let it scorch — I've survived worse mornings than this Let it scorch — let it scorch — I'm not asking to be forgiven, just to exist
[Outro] Black sun rising, and I rise with it too No prayer in my mouth, just the work left to do
Short Story
*A story for curious minds*
In a village where the mornings had gone strange and grey, there lived a gardener named Old Petra who refused to believe the sky was broken.
Every dawn the smoke from the valley mills rolled up over the hills and sat across the sun like a lid on a pot, and the villagers had taken to calling it the Black Hour, and staying indoors until it passed. Petra did not stay indoors. She went out to her garden the same as always, with her same bent hat and her same tin watering can, and she worked the soil as if the light were exactly the color it was supposed to be.
A boy named Emir, who delivered bread before school, stopped at her fence one such morning. "Doesn't it bother you," he asked, "that the sun comes up black?"
"The sun doesn't come up black," Petra said, not looking up. "The smoke comes up grey. The sun is doing exactly what it always does. We just can't see it doing it."
Emir thought about this while she worked. "But you can't prove that," he said. "Maybe it really is different now."
"I don't need to prove it," said Petra. "I just need to keep watering the tomatoes as if it's true."
Days passed, and weeks, and the Black Hour did not lift, and the other gardens in the village went dry and grey-leafed because their keepers had stopped tending them, certain that nothing could grow under a ruined sky. But Petra's garden kept its color. Not because she had some secret seed or some private sunlight. Only because she had decided, every single morning, that her hands didn't need permission from the sky to do their work.
One evening — and it was evening this time, not morning, so the light was simply fading the ordinary way — Emir came back with his empty bread basket and found Petra's tomatoes heavy and red against the dusk.
"How did you do it?" he asked.
Petra straightened up slowly, the way old women do, like unfolding a letter that's been folded too long. "I didn't make the sun come back," she said. "I just never agreed to stop."
The smoke cleared eventually, the way these things do, weeks later, on its own schedule, owing nothing to anyone's patience. But by then half the village had learned something from watching one stubborn woman water her garden under a sky everyone else had given up on: that waiting for the light to return and refusing to wait are, in the end, two very different ways of surviving the dark, and only one of them grows tomatoes.
Emir kept delivering bread. He never again asked Petra if the sky was broken. He just watched what she did with her hands, and did the same with his.
More From This Album
