Dust of the Great Plains

As I crossed over the border of Ontario that night
I bid farewell to the violence of my older life
Met a woman with a fire so bright burning in her eyes
That the world must just have missed her, or it wouldn’t have passed her by

For two hundred days we lived in Niagara-by-the-Lake
There’s only so much beauty a single man can take
Before he tears it all apart, for he can never rest
And I was bound for the mountains rising in the West

I met a girl named Julia on the Canadian Railway
She had a sadness in her eyes, asked me if I prayed
I said “we are the creators, it’s up to us what we will make”
She nodded, smiled, said “I’ve just learned what such creation takes.”

I made my way across a country I had never seen before
Found some work in Kelowna, some women who’d open their doors
I was never much to look at, but I was smarter than the game
I knew my mind was different, and that they were all the same

Every now and then my Great Lakes woman crossed my mind
But I never went back to see her, never seemed to be the time
Then I ended up a driver in the American mid-west
And the highway miles of my future just blocked out all the rest

But then outside Pennsylvania a year or so down the line
I just got out of my cab, started drifting like a sigh
Made my way back to Canada, to the Northern Great Plains
Met an Abel of the oil fields, and I became a Cain

That land it had been given an offering from above
And I was a believer again in the blackened holy dove
But I killed a man for a payoff, for I could not tame the lust
To earn my share of money from the drifting Prairie dust

I left under cover of darkness, but no one ever cared
Men were nothing to ‘em, the money nothing compared
To the barrels they were making, the blood was bleeding from the ground
And I had bled my faith away, again on my way down

Now back here in Kelowna, in my head’s a lonely song
For the past is like that Prairie dust, scattered but not gone
And from my jet black money, a new life and plans I’ve laid
For we are the creators, and this is what I’ve made