Chlorine

Lyrics

The sharp smell.
You call it clean.
You breathe me in deep by the high dive.
You think you know me.

I guard the deep end now.
I draw the hard, white lines on the blue floor.
I keep the water clear, so you can see the bottom.
I burn the sickness out.
A summer job, a lifetime sentence.
The shouts of children echo under the roof.
They hold their breath and go under.
They trust me.

But I was not always the guardian.
I was the cloud.
A greenish-yellow tide rolling over wire and mud.
April, 1915.
I am heavier than air.
I knew the low places. I filled the trenches at Ypres.
I found the men who couldn't run.

They brought me in cylinders. Six thousand of them.
Waited for the wind to turn west.
Fritz Haber’s calculation.
A hissing, then a silence.
A wall of poison, five feet high, moving at a walking pace.
It smelled like pineapple and pepper, they said.
Before it took their breath for good.
Before they drowned in the fields of Flanders.

I was not the guardian then.
I was the cloud.
A greenish-yellow tide rolling over wire and mud.
April, 1915.
I am heavier than air.
I knew the low places. I filled the trenches at Ypres.
I found the men who couldn't breathe.

And now I live in the water.
I try to wash myself clean.
But every sting in a child's eye is a ghost.
Every gasp for air after a long lap… a memory.
Can this much blue ever rinse away that much green?
I purify. I sanitize.
I do my job.
But the echo in this big, wet room…
sounds like a cough.

The sharp smell.
You call it clean.
You hold your breath and go under.
You trust me.