Unsimple Songs
'we'll be clean when that work is done,
we'll be eternally free and eternally young'
played on the radio as I drove into work
this morning, a forty-year old song
about sixty-year old optimism.
It made me think, momentarily,
incorrectly, how humans are at their best
when they are singing about
the future. Of course, the
old spirituals did this best, and
its a lost art now, in this era of
hopelessness, of pridelessness.
Even now, as a grown man,
I will tear up if I hear
how can I keep from singing,
swing low sweet chariot,
if I had a hammer,
just like I did when I was small
and didn't understand the reasons why
those songs made me cry,
as I like to think I do now.
Really, what is so goddam funny about
peace love and understanding?
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