What the Air Is For (Fritz Haber)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
He pulled nitrogen
from the air
and turned it
into fertilizer
and the fertilizer
grew the wheat

Half the planet
eats tonight
because one man
looked at the sky
and saw a kitchen

[Chorus]
And the same man
filled canisters
with chlorine
and the chlorine
drifted into the trenches
and the lungs
tried to cough it out
but the coughing
pulled more in
because the moisture
in the lungsburned the gas
to acid
and the defense
became the delivery

My grandmother
would say:
the hand that feeds
and the hand that poisons
cannot be the same hand

But they were
the same hand
in the same laboratory
pulling different things
from the same air

[Verse 2]
His wife was a chemist
She understood
the molecular weight
of what he'd done

The night
they celebrated
the first deployment
she took his service pistol
to the garden
and their son
found her at dawn

He left
for the Eastern Front
before the burial

[Bridge]
The country
he gassed for
later decided
his name
was the wrong
kind of name

And the chemistry
he had built
was used to fill
smaller rooms
with people
who had
the same kind of name

He was dead by then
but his family
was not

[Final Chorus]
Half the world eats
because of him
A number
no one can finish counting
stopped breathing
because of him

And the distance
between the bread
and the chlorine
is one pair of hands
deciding
what the air is for

My grandmother
fed everyone
and hurt no one
and the difference
is not the chemistry
The difference
is the garden
in Berlin
where a woman
who understood the equation
solved it
with a pistol
and the dew

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