Morning

Poems

A little clapboard building
Underneath a silver moon
Closes down at three a.m.
Opens up at noon
No use tryin’ to stay away
You’ll hurry back real soon
You’ll find it all and have a ball
At the Feed ‘n’ Seed Saloon.

Now you might go for bluegrass
And an old-time fiddle tune
Or to hear Jim Dandy play and sing
My how that boy can croon
You’re sure to feel like dancin’
Spryer than a young baboon
Yes, we’ve agreed it’s all we need
The Feed ‘n’ Seed Saloon.

The dogs are underneath the porch and Josie’s in her pasture
Chewin’ grass and ringin’ her cowbell
The crib is stocked with store-bought feed and old corn cobs from last year
Granny’s drawin’ water from the well.

Here comes the yellow Mayfield’s truck, he’ll stop there in the road
With Brown Cows and buttermilk to sell
Tonight we’ll have peach cobbler with ice cream — a la mode!
While Josie plays a song on her cowbell.

Maybe we are given life to do the best we can
If we don’t try we’ll sink down like a stone
With any luck before the end we’ll come to understand
Time is not a gift it’s just a loan.

I have squandered many hours, thrown so much away
Pretending that my time was not my own
And still I had the fortune to wake up another day
And get another chance to pay my loan.

One spring when flowers hugged the ground
And sweetly sang the sparrow
A man came walking into town
He wore a large sombrero.

He carried a ten-penny pipe
And played Ravel’s Bolero
He stayed until the plums were ripe
This man in the sombrero.

One day they looked and he was gone
As swiftly as an arrow
Like Pancho Villa or Don Juan
The man in the sombrero.

The things that made it special aren’t easy to explain
Sometimes in my bed at night I’d hear the midnight train
In the land of blackberries and sugar cane.

Summers were so dry sometimes we’d kneel and pray for rain
And on cold winter mornings ice would frost the window pane
In the land of blackberries and sugar cane.

The old red rooster ruled the roost and spun the weather vane
We sang “Shady Grove”, “In the Pines”, “Eliza Jane”
In the land of blackberries and sugar cane.

Days were full of wonder even though our lives were plain
In the land of blackberries and sugar cane.