What You Look For - Mary Chapin Carpenter

What you look for on a dirty street

Is a patch of green beneath your feet

A stubborn weed or a traveling rose

Either one lives to grow

What you look for in a stranger’s eyes

Is if he sees through your disguise

How we long to be revealed

To be known we might be healed

Send it out into the Universe

A humble plea, a wish, a broken verse

Be a seed that lands inside the cracks

Seek the sun and it shines back

What you looked for when you were a girl

Was a window out into the world

From a speeding car or a passing train

You were hypnotized just the same

And what you look for now that you are grown

Is proof of how time has flown

An empty house, a strand of grey

And an endless longing for yesterday

Send it out into the Great Elsewhere

A kind of hope, a chant, a simple prayer

Be the child whose dreams won’t ever fade

Shout and storm the barricades

What you look for in your darkest hour

Is a dirty street with just a flower…

Send it out not knowing where it went

Into the blue, into the firmament

Be the one who wonders at it all

Send it out into the Universe

A humble plea, a wish, a broken verse

Be a seed that lands inside the cracks

Seek the sun and it shines back

It shines back