I awoke last night. He was calling my name

I want to know, he said, whose to blame?

Where were you? You heard my cries

Tell me the truth. Tell me no lies

I heard you scream throughout the night

And beg to die by the day’s first light

I wanted to come, as did we all

Please understand, it wasn’t our call

Not your call? They beat me to death

I begged for mercy with my dying breath

I loved and I trusted you just like a brother

How did you face my wife, my poor Mother?

Why did you betray me when I needed you most?

I’d have come for you, said Bobby Hester’s ghost

I hung my head, consumed with shame

You’re right, I said. I am to blame

But God forgive me. What could I do?

I was but one in a sea of blue

And, in the end, didn’t we made them pay?

Once we entered, it was judgment day

I know that you died alone and afraid.

Cursing my soul, feeling betrayed.

Trust me, my friend, you weren’t alone

God, how I wish you could have known

There has been no peace for my tortured soul

On all of us, it’s taken its toll

For a mortal sin, there can be no penance

I accept eternal guilt as a fair and just sentence

But I ask you now, as I do God every day

What did we do? For what did we pay?

Why on a winter’s eve in 1983

Did God turn his back on Memphis Tennessee?

We were but boys in blue who believed in each other

Our strength, our confidence came from one another

In the age of innocence, how could we have known

That Memphis’s finest would abandon their own?