You Stay Here

Listen while you read:  https://youtu.be/_NDQvU2NsFI

You stay here 
And I'll go look for God
Not so hard
'Cause I know where he's not
I will bring him back with me
Make him listen -- make him see

You stay here
And I'll go look for wood

~  Richard Shindell

"You Stay Here", from Richard Shindell's 2000 release, Somewhere Near Paterson, is a song about Bosnian refugees fleeing the besieged city of Sarajevo.  The Bosnian War for Independence claimed a five-year siege of the city, from 1992 to 1996, a time in which Serbian Nationalist forces assaulted the Bosnians, leaving over 11,000 dead (including 1500 children) and injuring 56,000.  Bosnian refugees settled in the United States between 1992 and 2007.

Shindell tells the story of how the song came to be.  A line popped into his head before he went to sleep one night.  "You stay here and I'll go look for wood."  He wrote the line down, but when he woke in the morning and discovered it, he had no idea what it was for, who said it, or what he should do with it.  But having been reading recently about the refugees from Sarajevo, he determined that the speaker of the line was a Bosnian trying to keep his family safe while looking for basic survival needs.  "That's the thing about writing songs," said Shindell.  "When you get a voice, when you find out who is singing, you get a very clear idea of their identity, the song writes itself."

The five verses of the song each deal with a basic need:  wood for the fire, bread for sustenance, coats for warmth, guns in case "the Tiger comes one night," and God.

And it begs the question:  where is God?  "I know where he's not."

The refugees in need of asylum today may come from different places than they did in the years preceding and following the turn of the century.  But the crises that compel them to seek a better life are just as dire.  There is someone who needs to listen, who needs to see . . . but I don't think it's God.