Hell To Pay

After composing this slow, introspective melody, I needed a subject and an opening line. As I crossed the bridge over the River Thames one day on my way to my office at The University of Western Ontario in London, these words that fit the first bars of the song came to me: “Never has the river looked so cold, so bitterly inviting.”
It was also Lent, and somehow the words “cold” and “bitter” put me in the direction of a song about Judas’ betrayal and Peter’s denial. And so the opening line became “Thirty silver pieces, just enough to buy a bloody pasture.”
Thankfully, despite its dark tone and subject matter, the song ends hopefully, just as the somber season of Lent does on Easter.

Hell To Pay

Thirty silver pieces. Just enough to buy a bloody pasture
Suicidal impulse to reverse the roles and be the master
The inner circle turning its back

No way ‘round, it has to come to this
Intersecting love and hate; a cruel kiss
That raises purple welts with a caress harsher than a blow
Fiendish hint of hell to pay, of how low it has to go

Pointed accusations bringing on the spectre of exposure
Fierce denunciations, fingers, torches, maddening enclosure
The inner circle turning its back

Once confessor, now antagonist
Stabs him in the back and gives the knife a twist
Within the grip of fear the rock insists that he doesn’t know
Fiendish hint of hell to pay, of how low it has to go

Instrumental

Then that lonely death, that piercing cry
Eli, Eli, oh lama sabachthani
The world grinds to a halt under a sky darker than a grave
Heaven’s inner circle turns away. There is hell to pay

Finally when things can not get worse
Comes the mighty lifting of the bitter curse
The liberation of the groaning earth that now turns its face
To the radiance of crimson love and forgiving grace
Shining eyes and surging dunamis for the human race

© Peter Slofstra • March/April 1985 • London, Ontario