What the Keeper of Tradition Wants

Lyrics

[Intro]I found your book on a slope of red scoria.Far from Kyoto.It smells of salt wind and old paper.Modern Millie. What a name for a ghost.[Verse 1]Three thousand poems learned by heart before fifteen.The scrape of silk on a tatami floor.The precise angle of a wrist pouring sake.Every gesture a memory, a rule, a cage.Mineko Iwasaki began at four, retired at twenty-nine.You learned the art of being looked at,a perfect painting that never meets your eye.They burned the private diaries, to protect the house.But you didn't burn.[Chorus]This is the ink you saved.The body beneath the kimono's thirteen layers.This is the un-choreographed want.The dream you hid under the gaze of stone giants on Rapa Nui.What does the keeper of tradition want?When the teahouse is dark and the guests are gone?[Verse 2]The pages are not neat.The characters race and stumble.Here, a lover with a steel-frame bicycle, not a palanquin.Here, a room in a concrete city, windows wide to the noise.No whispers behind a fan, just a shout into the traffic.You write of blue jeans and electricity.Of a kiss that smudges the perfect white paint of your skin.A modern heart beating a thousand-year-old rhythm.[Chorus]This is the ink you saved.The body beneath the kimono's thirteen layers.This is the un-choreographed want.The dream you hid under the gaze of stone giants on Rapa Nui.What does the keeper of tradition want?When the teahouse is dark and the guests are gone?[Bridge]Did you fly here? Did you carry this notebook like a child?Past the quarries of Rano Raraku,to the lonely eastern cliffs of the Poike peninsula.Did the Moai watch you bury it?Did they understand?A keeper of secrets, leaving her own secretswith older, colder keepers.[Outro]The wind off the Pacific turns a page in my hand.It's a language I know.The ache for the other life.The one you wrote in secret.The one you lived right here.Millie.