Saturday, February 28, 2015

YOU WON'T HEAR THE LIKES OF THIS ANYMORE EITHER

I've posted these lyrics before. It's from the seventies. And the era of mountain top removal mining, the Alberta tar sands, exploding tanker cars, depleted aquifers, big Ag's strip mining of the topsoil; the whole miserable I'm going to get mine now and screw the people who come after us mindset, it resonates more than ever.

LEAVE THEM A FLOWER 

I speak on behalf of the next generation.
Our sons and their daughters, their children to come.
What will we leave them for their recreation?
And oil slick? A pylon? An industrial slum?

Chorus:

Leave them a flower, some grass and a hedge row.
A hill and a valley. A view to the sea.
These things are not ours to destroy as we want to;
A gift given once for eternity.

We plunder. We pillage. We tear and we tunnel.
Trees lying toppled, they finger the sky.
Building a land for machines and computers.
In the name of progress, the farms have to die.

Chorus:

Fish in the oceans, polluted and poisoned.
The sand on our beaches all stinking and black.
We and our tankers and banks and investsments
They never worry, the birds will come back.

Chorus:

When the last flower has dropped its last petal.
Then the last concrete is finally laid.
The moon will shine cold in a nightmarish landscape.
Our gift to our children. The world that we made.


Wally Whyton covered by Ed Ames among others. Somewhere I have Ames' LP with this on it. I may just break down and buy the CD. I'm really going to date myself, watched Ed Ames perform this on the Mike Douglas show years ago. 

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