The Hundred Trillion Loaf

Lyrics

The air was thick in Harare that year.
Thick with the smell of printing ink and fear.
Every morning, the price of waking up was more.
Than everything you owned the night before.

The sun came up in 2008.
And the price of eggs was already too late.
You'd get your pay in a plastic grocery sack,
By the time you reached the market, you couldn't buy it back.
Saw a man with a wheelbarrow, wasn't hauling stone.
Just the price of a bus ticket to get his family home.
The zeros kept on coming, a plague of empty circles.
Staining all the paper, making everything worthless.

And the baker wrote the number on a piece of dusty glass.
A hundred trillion dollars for a loaf to make it last.
Just until the evening, just until the dawn.
A hundred trillion dollars... and then the bread was gone.

Came November, the rain was overdue.
Gideon Gono's presses, they were printing something new.
Seventy-nine billion percent, that's what they said.
The cost of staying hungry, the cost of being fed.
The ATMs went quiet, couldn't count that high.
Saw a woman use a five-billion-dollar note to dry her eye.
January sixteenth, '09, the masterpiece was done.
Fourteen zeros trailing a lonely number one.

And the baker wrote the number on a piece of dusty glass.
A hundred trillion dollars for a loaf to make it last.
Just until the evening, just until the dawn.
A hundred trillion dollars... and then the bread was gone.

They gave up on the dollar at the end of that January.
Said, use the Rand, use the US green, this paper's just to bury.
And a quiet fell on the market stalls, a strange and heavy peace.
No more rustling plastic bags, a terrible release.
You can lose your savings, you can lose your home.
But what do you call it when you lose the numbers you have known?

I saw one yesterday, in a frame behind some glass.
The Chiremba Balancing Rocks, a future that couldn't last.
A hundred trillion dollars.
A souvenir of loss.
Just the cost of bread.
Just the cost.