Lyrics of 'Dead Man's Dump' by The Tiger Lillies

The plunging limbers over the shattered track
Racketed with their rusty freight
Stuck out like many crowns of thorns
And the rusty stakes like sceptres old
To stay the flood of brutish men
Upon our brothers dear

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead
But pained them not, though their bones crunched
Their shut mouths made no moan
They lie there huddled, friend and foeman
Man born of man, and born of woman
And shells go crying over them
From night till night and now

Earth has waited for them
All the time of their growth
Fretting for their decay
Now she has them at last!
In the strength of their strength
Suspended—stopped and held

What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit?
Earth! Have they gone into you!
Somewhere they must have gone
And flung on your hard back
Is their soul’s sack
Emptied of God-ancestralled essences
Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

None saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass
Or stood aside for the half used life to pass
Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth
When the swift iron burning bee
Drained the wild honey of their youth

What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre
Walk, our usual thoughts untouched
Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed
Immortal seeming ever?
Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us
A fear may choke in our veins
And the startled blood may stop

The air is loud with death
The dark air spurts with fire
The explosions ceaseless are
Timelessly now, some minutes past
Those dead strode time with vigorous life
Till the shrapnel called ‘An end! ’
But not to all. In bleeding pangs
Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home
Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts

Maniac Earth! Howling and flying, your bowel
Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love
The impetuous storm of savage love
Dark Earth! Dark Heavens! Swinging in chemic smoke
What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul
With lightning and thunder from your mined heart
Which man’s self dug, and his blind fingers loosed?

A man’s brains splattered on
A stretcher-bearer’s face
His shook shoulders slipped their load
But when they bent to look again
The drowning soul was sunk too deep
For human tenderness

They left this dead with the older dead
Stretched at the cross roads

Burnt black by strange decay
Their sinister faces lie
The lid over each eye
The grass and coloured clay
More motion have than they
Joined to the great sunk silences

Here is one not long dead
His dark hearing caught our far wheels
And the choked soul stretched weak hands
To reach the living word the far wheels said
The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light
Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels
Swift for the end to break
Or the wheels to break
Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight

Will they come? Will they ever come?
Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules
The quivering-bellied mules
And the rushing wheels all mixed
With his tortured upturned sight
So we crashed round the bend
We heard his weak scream
We heard his very last sound
And our wheels grazed his dead face