The Cyclorama's Grand Tour

Lyrics

You weren't born here.
You weren't meant for here.
Just a circle of Belgian linen, waiting for a story you'd never actually seen.

Milwaukee, 1886.
The air thick with linseed oil and German words.
Men who'd never seen Georgia clay painted a battle from second-hand maps and hearsay.
They gave a general the wrong color horse.
They painted cannon smoke where maybe there was only dust.
A perfect, beautiful, monumental mistake, stitched together panel by panel in the cold North.

And you were rolled up tight inside a wooden crate.
A three-hundred-and-fifty-eight-foot ghost on a freight train.
You were aimed at Minneapolis, but you overshot the mark.
You were always headed south, weren't you?
On a long grand tour, just looking for your park.

You saw Chicago under gaslight.
The echoing murmurs of the crowds, walking the circle, feeling the heat from a painted fire.
A spectacle. A carnival attraction.
A traveling show.
Did you know then? That this wasn't home?
Just another stop on a very long road.

And you were rolled up tight inside a wooden crate.
A three-hundred-and-fifty-eight-foot ghost on a freight train.
You were aimed at Minneapolis, but you overshot the mark.
You were always headed south, weren't you?
On a long grand tour, just looking for your park.

Then a man named George V. Gress saw you.
He saw a history for his city.
Eighteen ninety-one.
The groan of the crate opening onto Atlanta soil.
You unspooled your long memory into the humid air.
A home built just for you. A round house in Grant Park.

All that way.
From a studio in Wisconsin, through the Midwest.
To a patch of green donated by a railroad man.
You found your place.
The wrong horse, the painted smoke, and all.
You finally came home.