Forty Days and Nights - David Knopfler

The wind is weeping voices and they fill my tattooed sails

Maybe God in grace rejoices as another sinner fails

She says «You talk like every crazy, transfixed by The Northern Lights

There’s a movie a-running round your head, call it 'Forty Days and Nights'»

For forty days and forty nights in the belly of my whale

I was handcuffed high on my own denial and a blacklist of betrayals

I have bowed my head in silence, nailed inside «Belief»

Crucified by certainties and righteous burning grief

I have travelled with the holy, the worldly and the wise

Baby maybe we were closer then than we ever realised

For forty days and forty nights I wrestled here with my appetites

Pressed up against your pearly gates with such promise of delights

But for all these vows to heaven, how many change their ways?

And I would sooner tremble in your eyes than feel nothing in your gaze

If I rejected all ambition — If I resigned the two bit parts

If the price was true perdition — Man I knew that from the start

I have done with helpless feelings and I have climbed your callous walls

Where catcalls, jeers and beatings break these bartered, broken souls

Where shadows vault the ceilings at the vivisection ball

When the wings of death come a- beating fast across these martyr’s halls

I’m still living with my conscience still celebrating Art

'Til I Reach the last confinement at The Home of Exiled Hearts

The King and Queen of Laughter — they got no place left to go

And they will play out their final chapter here on death row radio

Where with the angels of the city as the guilty stars burn out

My Samurai are sleeping light in Tinseltown tonite

In the wind I still hear voices as the ancient comrades call

Does God in grace avert his face as another angel falls?

I can hear their voices clearer at the final curtain call

There were many who rejoiced to see a tiny sparrow fall

How the sins of all their fathers — stack up against the sons

Called but never chosen — to be their chosen ones

And the wind is weeping voices

They fill my tattooed sails

Maybe God in grace is crying at injustice that prevails

And averts his face in sufferance for those black trains on the rails

Perhaps right now he’s a-mocking my pretensions and portrayals

In forty days and forty night-time tales