Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone.
They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can’t go on.
And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song.
Oh I hope you run into them, you who’ve been travelling so long.
Yes you who must leave everything that you cannot control.
It begins with your family, but soon it comes around to your soul.
Well I’ve been where you’re hanging, I think I can see how you’re pinned:
When you’re not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you’ve sinned.
Well they lay down beside me, I made my confession to them.
They touched both my eyes and I touched the dew on their hem.
If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn
they will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.
When I left they were sleeping, I hope you run into them soon.
Don’t turn on the lights, you can read their address by the moon.
And you won’t make me jealous if I hear that they sweetened your night:
We weren’t lovers like that and besides it would still be all right,
We weren’t lovers like that and besides it would still be all right.
“I was in Edmonton, doing a tour by myself, I guess this was around ’67, and I was walking along one of the main streets of Edmonton. It was bitter cold and I knew no-one. I passed these two girls in a doorway and they invited me to stand in the doorway with them. Of course I did, and sometime later we found ourselves in my little hotel room, and the three of us were going to go to sleep together. Of course I had all sorts of erotic fantasies about what the evening might bring. We went to bed together, all jammed into this one small couch in this little hotel, and it became clear that wasn’t the purpose of the evening at all, and at one point in the night I found myself unable to sleep. I got up and by the moonlight, it was very very bright and the moonlight was being reflected off the snow, and I wrote that poem by the ice-reflected moonlight while these women were sleeping. It was one of the few songs I wrote from top to bottom without a line of revision. The words flowed and the melody flowed. By the time they woke up the next morning, it was dawn. I had this completed song to sing to them.” Included on Songs Of Leonard Cohen (1967).