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