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Original Content at https://www.opednews.com/articles/Sung-to-Guthrie-s-So-long-by-Gary-Lindorff-California_Climate-Change_Drought_Poetry-151104-977.html (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). |
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November 4, 2015
Sung to Guthrie's "So long, it's been good to know you" (for California)
By Gary Lindorff
A song for the California drought.
::::::::
I've sung this song and I'll sing it again,
With words more a-fittin' for the times we are in.
And I'll sing it the same to the rich and the poor
In a world where nature is keeping the score,
And it's so long it's been good to know you
So long, it's been good to know you
So long, it's been good to know you,
This nasty old drought has dried up my home
And I've got to be driftin' along.
Just how old this draught is, we all disagree
There were once fewer of us, no issue you see.
There was plenty of water, from the mountains it flowed,
We reaped and we harvested all that we sowed!
Now it's so long, it's been good to know you,
So long, it's been good to know you,
So long, it's been good to know you,
This nasty old drought has dried up my home
And I've got to be driftin' along.
Well, I walked right down to the convenience store
To buy me a bottle of Portand Spring water.
But the clerk sighed, "We're out." It was like dej vu:
He offered a coke or a cold Mountain Dew.
I said, so long, it's been good to know you,
So long, it's been good to know you,
So long, it's been good to know you,
This nasty old drought has dried up my home
And I've got to be driftin' along.
Well the sun beat down on the almond plantation.
One gallon per almond is the working equation,
One gallon per almond, but the aquifer's done!
Straight for the border all the pickers did run,
Sayin', so long, it's been good to know you,
So long, it's been good to know you,
So long, it's been good to know you
This nasty old drought has dried up your home,
And we've got to be movin' along.
The sweethearts sat in the park and they sparked
They hugged and they kissed in that hot, dusty park.
They sighed and cried, hugged and kissed
But instead of marriage they talked something like this: Honey,
So long, it's been good to know you,
So long, it's been good to know you,
This nasty old drought has dried up our home,
And I've got to be driftin' along.
Well, the techies they fretted, the techies they paced
Or they sat at their screens and all of them spaced.
The air conditioners were too much for the grid
So Silicon Valley was now on the skid.
It was so long, it's been good to know you,
So long, it's been good to know you,
So long, it's been good to know you,
This nasty old drought has dried up our home
And we've got to be driftin' along.
The church it was jammed, the church is was packed
And this was a Monday, and that is a fact!
Every one there was praying for rain,
So nobody heard what the preacher was sayin'
It was, So long, it's been good to know you,
So long, it's been good to know you,
So long, it's been good to know you,
This nasty old drought has dried up our home
And we've got to be driftin' along.
The telephone rang and it jumped off the wall
And that was Obama a-makin' his call.
He said "Kind friends, this might be the end."
Then he jumped in his jet for Hawaii, a-sayin'
So long, it's been good to know you,
So long, it's been good to know you,
So long, it's been good to know you,
I could have done better, but the climate was wrong,
And I've got to be movin' along.
Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.
He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.