Thom Moore lyrics and inspirations No Arrows

No Arrow

No arrow, but some kind of dove

is targeting hearts just for love.

O people,shout for the prize

that comes when this dove takes the sky.

In the aether of all, where no wall stops her flight,

no banner or cloud here can hide you from sight.

Your heart is her bead, and it goes on the string

that's fashioned for love as the greatest thing.

No arrow, but some kind of dove,

come target my heart just for love.

I need it, I shout for the prize

that comes with this dove on the rise.

Our hearts are her bead, and they go on the string

that's fashioned for love as the greatest thing.

But, if we block her art with closed mind or cold heart,

she won't thread the bead and the chain will part.

No arrow, but lashings of doves

are targeting hearts just for love.

No eagle, no raptor of skies,

can capture these doves where they fly:

In the aether of all, where no wall stops their flight,

no banners or clouds here can hide you from sight.

But, if you block their art with closed mind or cold heart,

they won't thread the bead and the chain will part.

Probably the most interesting thing about this song is the provenance of the melody. It can be a long story ... why not? Most people are aware that Hebrew was a liturgical language, and a long-dead one, when the state of Israel came into existence in 1948; but the mostly European-derived original ‘settlers’ spoke Hebrew as an official language, reconstituted and revived for political reasons. In the meantime, though, most of those European-derived Jews spoke a German dialect called, naturally enough, ‘Yiddish’ ... since that is how you would transcribe the German word ‘Judische’ from the Hebrew lettering that was and is traditionally used to write the language. What people largely don’t know is that the Jews of the Diaspora had a number of languages in which they conversed and expressed themselves: not just the vernaculars of their places of habitation, like Russian or Ukrainian or Polish or Serbo-Croatian or Turkish or Arabic ... but distinct dialects of existing languages, like Yiddish for German ... and Ladino (a Spanish dialect) for the Jews expelled into the Muslim world from their ancestral homes in Spain ... and for many Sephardic Jews in the Middle East and Central Asia, a form of Farsi that is perhaps best characterised as ‘Persian’. The original of this melody (much different from this) was first encountered by me in the mid-60s, in the singing of the Israeli Geula Gill. I loved the song she sang, Azizam, and learned to sing it, but when I finally did in front of people who were familiar with Farsi and related languages, they told me that this was a severely distinct kind of Persian spoken by Jews from areas of Uzbekistan and surrounding areas ... particularly Samarkand. That sounded sufficiently exotic to me to be terrifically romantic ... and this would be an attempt to render that original appreciation in a song about peace on earth ...