The Invisible City: Before the Seal

Lyrics

[Intro]They say you weren't born until twenty-twelve.But I knew you.I have your ghost on my tongue.A name whispered long before the charter was signed.[Verse 1]It started with a sound, didn't it?Nineteen-ten.The clean click of a golf ball.Ice clinking in tall glasses on a veranda.Someone said the name... Brookhaven.Just the name of a club, a stretch of green lawn.They didn't know they were christening a childthat wouldn't have a birth certificate for a hundred years.[Chorus]You were the invisible city.A place on the heart's map, but not DeKalb's.A soul without a seal.A body without a title.We sent our taxes down the road,but kept our stories here, in the untaxed yards.Brookhaven. The invisible city.[Verse 2]Then came the stones. Nineteen-thirteen.The clang of hammers on granite.James Rion McKissick's dream, rising from the red clay.Oglethorpe, a gothic spine for a city that wasn't.A solid anchor for a phantom limb of Atlanta.They built you a heart of stone while your name was still just a rumor on the wind.[Chorus]You were the invisible city.A place on the heart's map, but not DeKalb's.A soul without a seal.A body without a title.We sent our taxes down the road,but kept our stories here, in the untaxed yards.Brookhaven. The invisible city.[Bridge]And the decades fell like leaves on Peachtree Road.Summer nights thick with jasmine and exhaust fumes.Kids learned to ride their bikes on your streets.We said "we're from Brookhaven"and no one asked to see the papers.The community was the government.The shared memory was the law.A city woven from handshakes and front porch conversations.[Outro]Before July twenty-fourth, two-thousand and twelve...Before the vote, before the seal...You were here.You were always here.Just waiting for the mapmakers to catch up.