Bay of Plenty

Bay of Plenty, nineteen-forty, the ocean warm as tea War news crackling on the wireless, a world across the sea She's on the Marine Parade with her mother's London eyes He's a boy from the ostrich country, too shy to say hi Her people came from Leeds, from a Biržai long ago His people came from "near Warsaw", that's all he'll ever know And little did they know When he asked her for that dance That a hundred years of children Were waiting on that chance Little did they know Underneath that southern sky They were dreaming for the ones Who'd have to say goodbye Saturday at the bioscope, Sunday on the sand Shabbos with her family, he can barely hold her hand Her father talks of Yorkshire, his of feathers and the crash How the ostrich boom went bust and they lost all their cash Same old shtetl stories from the same cold Russian snow Two families from the old world who'd never met before And little did they know When he asked her for that dance That a hundred years of children Were waiting on that chance Little did they know Underneath that southern sky They were dreaming for the ones Who'd have to say goodbye Under the chuppah in March, in the Bay of Plenty light They broke the glass for Jerusalem, and they promised they'd get it right A house, a shul, a garden, a land to call our own "Our children will never pack a bag. Our children have a home." And the children grew, and their children grew, in the sun and the jacaranda And the land they loved went hard and strange, and the doors began to close So the grandkids packed the candlesticks, like the old ones always did To Sydney and Toronto, to Tel Aviv and Georgia with their kids Scattered like the seeds of a jacaranda tree New worlds again, wherever they could be And little did they know When he asked her for that dance That a hundred years of children Were waiting on that chance Little did they know Underneath that southern sky They were dreaming for the ones Who'd have to say goodbye Who'd have to say goodbye… Bay of Plenty… nineteen-forty… little did they know…