The Burning and the Phoenix

Lyrics

[Intro]
Not a lament.
A percussion.
The sound of a slate being wiped clean.

[Verse 1]
The record is clear. November 15, 1864.
General Sherman gives the order.
Not for homes, he wrote, but for the apparatus of war.
The rail yards. The warehouses.
The depot on Marietta Street.
From Capitol Hill, his aide Henry Hitchcock watched the smoke rise.
Smelled the pine resin and the cotton bales.
They twisted the iron rails around trees.
Called them Sherman's Neckties.
A neat, industrial erasure.

[Chorus]
But you misunderstand the text.
This was never a eulogy.
This is the prologue.
The heat that forges the civic seal.
From the ashes, a new charter.
From the cinders, a new name.
Resurgens.
Rising again.

[Verse 2]
They left one building standing.
The old Masonic Hall on Marietta.
A strange footnote in the 1865 ledger.
By summer, the rail gangs were back.
Laying new track on the warm ground.
The payrolls don't name them all.
But the work got done.
The city didn't pause to weep.
It started counting new bricks.

[Chorus]
You misunderstand the text.
This was never a eulogy.
This is the prologue.
The heat that forges the civic seal.
From the ashes, a new charter.
From the cinders, a new name.
Resurgens.
Rising again.

[Bridge]
And in 1887, the choice was made official.
Put it on the paper.
The firebird.
Not the locomotive.
Not the cotton plant.
They chose the burning.
They chose the renewal.
They read their own story back to themselves and said:
This is who we are.
We are the city that came from the fire.
A deliberate mythology.
And it worked.

[Outro]
It worked in 1996.
It works today.
The heat is still under the pavement.
Not an ending.
A furnace.
Resurgens.
Resurgens.