In Harm's Way

rewind a year or so…to septemer 3rd, 2015.
remember this?



if you weren’t living out of the news cycle, you saw this.
this is aylan kurdi, a 3-year-old boy who was lying dead, face down on the shores of turkey during the crisis of 2015…and just happened to be captured by a news photographer.
but children were dying daily, hourly, minutely.

the world turned its attention to the crisis because of the photo, but the news cycle fades, and crisis didn’t go away. it persists.

when i saw the photo, like most people (i assume), my heart skipped a beat and i found myself crying.

how could all of us in this world be taking such poor care of one another?
what the fuck is happening?

i was due to give birth in two weeks.

my womb hurt.



two weeks later, i gave birth to ash in the woods of tenessee, far away from the news, far away from everything. my kamikaze-cabaret friend meow meow called and told me she was working on an original meow-style production of hans christen anderson’s “the little mermaid” for the malthouse in melbourne, and would i contribute a song?

i wanted to. but couldn’t. i barely had time to pee or answer my texts or make a bowl of soup. i’d just given birth. i told her i wanted to, but i just… couldn’t find the mental or physical time.

a few months later, in december, after we’d gotten back from our birth-journey and visiting some relatives, i was home with ash in boston and neil was off…somewhere.
meow called me at 5pm. the show was going into production in a week, she said, but she was still short one song. she needed a song where the little mermaid was standing on one shore, looking at the other, and trying to make sense of love and loss.

DON’T DO THIS TO ME, MEOW. we talked for an hour about love. and loss. and water. and pain. and healing. and all the things. while i cradled and nursed a baby.

i told her there was almost no chance in hell i’d be able to write anything. babies and empty apartments and pianos just don’t match. (this was all before i discovered the wonders of babysitters).

and then – as fate would have it – ash decided to take a spontaneous baby nap.

i sat down at the piano in my boston apartment and wrote the first draft of “in harm’s way”….which, at the time, i titled “the refugee’s brother.”
i sent it to meow in the morning. i said it was the best i could do during a baby nap. but i was proud of it: it captured something.

meow took it off to its own arrangement-world, tweaked the lyrics a little, and created something beautiful out of it (you’ll be able to hear when she releases the official CD for her show), and i stuck the song in a box.

Amanda Palmer