780 · Music Catalog
Two Horizons
Indie Hip Hop
// EXHIBIT 08 — DIASPORA · THE SHOWCASE SAMPLER
Two Horizons
STEEL
“TWO HORIZONS”
1-OF-1 COVER ARTWORK
Inspired by the tension between the child who had to hide and the man who finally gets to be whole. The cold Soviet landscape represents fear and inherited silence; the suitcase, a childhood interrupted; the Star of David, an identity kept hidden but never erased. The image is about more than exile. It's about coming home to yourself.
// THE CONCEPT
Written from the inside of a childhood spent in Soviet Ukraine, where one name lived at school and another stayed quiet at home. The song follows a boy who left with dust on his sleeves and the Dnipro still in his chest, protected by parents who kept a dangerous truth warm so he could grow. Years later the locked word finally opens. This is not a protest song and not a history lesson. It is the sound of someone who was taught to survive by silence, then chose to speak with both horizons open.
// LYRICS
[Verse 1]
I left with dust on my sleeves and the Dnipro in my chest,
same hands that packed the suitcase, same hands that took the test.
I loved that ground like blood loves bone, like roots love buried rain,
but love can learn the language of a boot and still feel pain.
They smiled through the window while the winter bit the glass,
I learned to count the exits before I learned to pass.
A boy with my mother's accent, a map folded in my coat,
one name at school, one name at home, one prayer I never wrote.
I called the field my kingdom when the sun hit the broken fence,
threw stones with the other children, laughed like innocence.
But some old fear lived in the air, a draft beneath the door,
my parents kept a secret warm so I could ask for more.
They hid the part that made me fit a target on the page,
not from shame, but from the wolves that circle every cage.
So I grew up with a locked-up word asleep inside my throat,
not knowing why the silence felt like another winter coat.
[Verse 2]
I learned my face could travel, learned my surname could be bent,
learned how a moving heart survives on borrowed confidence.
In a yard behind the building, we'd trade stories, kick a ball,
I almost said the hidden thing that would have changed it all.
Not because I was hunting for a wound to make me real,
but because a child will tell the sky whatever he can feel.
My mother watched me dance too close to the edge of daylight,
my father kept the reason where the shadows held it tight.
Years later, when the papers came and history showed its teeth,
I saw the pattern carved in ash beneath the painted wreath.
Then came the truth, slow as thaw, sharp as broken glass,
I was the thing they feared to name, the thing that had to pass.
Jewish blood, unnamed and guarded, wrapped in a parent's fear,
they carried that inheritance like a storm they kept from here.
So when I say I lost a country, know I did not lose the land,
I lost the right to be myself with an open hand.
Now I wear the whole truth forward, every scar and every word,
a refugee with two horizons, finally seen, finally heard.
Verbatim lyrics, as written.
VERSE 1 — KYIV CHILDHOOD · VERSE 2 — THE TRUTH OPENS
// PRODUCTION COMMENTARY
Indie Hip Hop. Written from the inside of a childhood in Soviet Ukraine — one name at school, one name at home — and the choice, years later, to speak with both horizons open.
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