Episode 6: And the rain fell softly

East Hastings tells the story of how and why they grew into the Last Forest.   

Episode Transcript

East Hastings (00:17):
We are wild and nourishing.
Golden brown, heavy breath.
But when your salty tears leakedgently through the cracks of
time and space and spattered onour naked leaves, and stones...

(00:38):
we remembered.

(00:59):
We remember the violent, moaningsummer, we shouted Rise!
Rise!!
The dirty horde’s last swill spreadingtheir shrunken disease, while we
flocked to the frontline and survived onrice, boiled eggs and tender, fragrant
cabbage, dark-haired guitars and scouredpot laps simmering on the campfire.

(01:25):
All around the heavy breath of Battle,blowing horn and whiplash dazed.
Rabble, rabble, snitches, thieves.
Sick and bloated hoodlums.
Whining, fierce drums.
Pot-bellied sweat.
Gleaming, wounded terror.

(01:57):
We protested, we marched, welocked arms, we locked on.
We cried, Eat shit Scum! Andwe climbed high, but every
time it ended the same way.
One by one, or by the hundreds, theydragged us out and they locked us up.

(02:19):
And still we came, by the thousandswe stayed, and we held the line.
We peeled back our skin andshrugged off our skulls.
Dangling like small puppetswrithing on the killing room floor.
Surrounded by the one-armed gallowsdancing, bone-broken fingers.

(02:41):
The taste of skin, and filthy blood.
Yanked high above the howlingvampires plastered in their
poison-gullet death machines.
Our heads held high.
Our tears leaking in the mud.

(03:03):
And so many of those who stood withus were lost in that final hour.
Sick and sweaty with despair.
Burned out, surrendered...
Or gone like ragged children,hail still coiled around their
necks, ugly, cold, angry.
Beaten to a whimper.

(03:30):
But some of us stayedin the winter clay.
We could not give up.
And we sat around on the forest floorreaching out to each other, the trees.
Around us.
We dug in toes first andthe rain fell softly.

(03:57):
We closed our eyes once andforever to the horror, and this
is how we made our final stand.
Our hearts full of despair, our eyesrolled back and sealed in their sockets,

(04:18):
our tongues decomposing in the topsoil, our faces, food for worms.
Limbs split and twistedbeyond recognition.
Unbearable mourning falling longafter the seasons and the years.
After the living and after the dead.

(04:43):
In silence and in shadow.
Endlessly we hold the line.
Forgotten, unbidden.
While dreams, faint and strange,decorate our perfect leafy temple,
adrift in an ocean of ruin andsurrounded by every atrocity.