Room For Us All
Intro
Verse 1
We had a little kitchen table, only built for two,
A wobbly leg, a coffee ring, a candle, me and you.
Then a knock came at the screen door, someone new in town,
Said, "I don't know a soul here." So I said, "Then sit on down."
I pulled the leaf out of the closet, where it leaned behind the broom,
Slid it in the middle, and the kitchen found the room.
Pre-Chorus
Somebody told me long ago, and I've always understood:
A table that won't open up is just a pile of wood.
Chorus
So pull up a chair, any chair that you find,
A crate or a bucket, we don't really mind.
Put in another leaf, push back the wall,
Bring what you've got, or bring nothing at all.
This table keeps growing,
There's room for us all.
Verse 2
Then word got out the way it does, all the way down the street,
And the card table came up from the basement on its rusty metal feet.
There's a widower who barely talks, but he's the first one at the sink,
And a kid who couldn't go home this year is laughing harder than you'd think.
Someone says a blessing in a language I don't know,
But "thank you" sounds like "thank you" anywhere you go.
Pre-Chorus
Nothing here is matching, not the china, not the glass,
But the more we pass the bread around, the more there is to pass.
Chorus
So pull up a chair, any chair that you find,
A crate or a bucket, we don't really mind.
Put in another leaf, push back the wall,
Bring what you've got, or bring nothing at all.
This table keeps growing,
There's room for us all.
Bridge
But there's one place that was harder, one I almost didn't set,
For the one I haven't spoken to since the last time that we met.
Different signs out on our lawns, and words we can't take back,
I've carried every one of them like stones inside a sack.
But I set your place there anyway, the good plate and the wine,
'Cause "room for us all" ain't worth a thing if it only fits my kind.
Then the candles flicker... a knock upon the door...
Final Verse
Now it's out the back door, down the steps, past the garden and the gate,
On sawhorses and a borrowed door and a hundred mismatched plates.
The neighbors drag their tables out, end to end along the block,
Till the whole street is a supper and nobody's watching the clock.
String lights from porch to porch, and the kids run down the line,
And somehow there's still soup left, and somehow there's still time.
Final Chorus
So pull up a chair! (pull up a chair) Any chair that you find!
A crate or a bucket! We don't really mind!
Put in another leaf! Push back the wall!
Bring what you've got, or bring nothing at all!
This table keeps growing!
There's room for us all! (Room for us all!)
Outro
Nobody can tell anymore
Where my kitchen ends
And yours begins.