From the album Dancing through the fire
Cambridge Riffs Records
www.cambridgeriffs.co.uk/records

Lyrics:
Numbers ©Malcolm Guite 2011

It took two loving bodies,
Bringing comfort through the night,
And two hearts beating faster
To bring Billy to the light,
Around a thousand kisses
Saw that baby on the way,
But it only took one finger
To blow it all away

It took a mother’s labour pains
It took a skillful midwife too,
Two grandmas knitting double-time
Those suits of baby blue,
It took years of love to raise him right
With room to grow and play
But it only took one second
To blow it all away

Chorus:
We cannot count the multitude
Who made us what we are
The many friends who formed us
And who carried us this far;
A hundred acts of kindness
That no one can repay
One finger, and one trigger
Can blow it all away

It took that teenage boy a while
To find his own two feet
So he took his best friend with him
On that sixteenth birthday treat
And the two boys took a shortcut
Down a darkened alleyway
And they walked into the crossfire
That took Billy’s life away

I don’t know how the gunman
Tells the story of that day
He was ‘taking care of business’
When some kid got in the way
We make it hard to grow up right
And hard to make things pay
But we sure make it easy
To blow everything away

It took forty-seven minutes
For the funeral to pass
Though it felt like we were crawling
Over miles of broken glass
And I saw it all in front of me
When I closed my eyes to pray:
The finger, and the trigger
And the life they took away

Malcolm Guite Vocals.Guitar.