October 25, 2003
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Poignant thing Which Leaves Me Speechless
Remember The Mountain Bed
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
woodvines 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,
As your fingers played with grassy moss, and limber
did you 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 breasts of my woman and child to scatter
my seeds again.
Woody Guthrie 1944
