Remember the Mountain Bed, by Woody Guthrie.
In other words, pretty much everything anyone could hope to say in a song.
Do you still sing of the mountain bed we made of limbs and leaves?
         Do you still sigh there near the sky where the holly berry bleeds?
         You laughed as I covered you over with leaves
         Face, breast, hips, and thighs
         You smiled when I said the leaves were just the color of your eyes
       
         Rosin smells and turpentine smells from eucalyptus and pine
         Bitter tastes of twigs we chewed where tangled wood vines twine
         Trees held us in on all four sides so thick we could not see
         I could not see any wrong in you, and you saw none in me
       
         Your arm was brown against the ground, your cheeks part of the sky
         Your fingers played with grassy moss, as limber you did lie
         Your stomach moved beneath your shirt and your knees were in the air
         Your feet played games with mountain roots as you lay thinking there
       
         Below us the trees grew clumps of trees, raised families of trees, and            they
         As proud as we tossed their heads in the wind and flung good seeds            away
         The sun was hot and the sun was bright down in the valley below
         Where people starved and hungry for life so empty come and go
       
         There in the shade and hid from the sun we freed our minds and learned
         Our greatest reason for being here, our bodies moved and burned
         There on our mountain bed of leaves we learned life's reason why
         The people laugh and love and dream, they fight, they hate to die
       
         The smell of your hair I know is still there, if most of our leaves            are blown
         Our words still ring in the brush and the trees where singing seeds            are sown
         Your shape and form is dim but plain, there on our mountain bed
         I see my life was brightest where you laughed and laid your head...
       
         I learned the reason why man must work and how to dream big dreams
         To conquer time and space and fight the rivers and the seas
         I stand here filled with my emptiness now and look at city and land
         And I know why farms and cities are built by hot, warm, nervous hands
       
         I crossed many states just to stand here now, my face all hot with            tears
         I crossed city, and valley, desert, and stream, to bring my body here
         My history and future blaze bright in me and all my joy and pain
         Go through my head on our mountain bed where I smell your hair again.
       
         All this day long I linger here and on in through the night
         My greeds, desires, my cravings, hopes, my dreams inside me fight:
         My loneliness healed, my emptiness filled, I walk above all pain
         Back to the breast of my woman and child to scatter my seeds again
Saturday, January 10, 2009
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1 comment:
thanks for sharing such beautiful words.
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