Remember the Mountain Bed lyrics
by Woody Guthrie
[Verse 1]
Do you still sing of the mountain bed
We made of limbs and leaves?
Do you still sigh there near the sky
Where the holly berry bleeds?
You laughed as I covered you over with leaves
Face, breast, hips and thighs
You smiled when I said the leaves
Were just the color of your eyes
[Verse 2]
Rosin smells and turpentine smells
From eucalyptus and pine
Bitter tastes of twigs we chewed
Where Tanglewood vines twine
Trees held us in on all four sides
So thick we could not see
I could not see any wrong in you
And you saw none in me
[Verse 3]
Your arm was brown against the ground
Your cheeks part of the sky
Your fingers played with grassy moss
As limber you did lie
Your stomach moved beneath your shirt
And your knees were in the air
Your feet played games with mountain roots
As you lay thinking there
[Verse 4]
Below us the trees grew clumps of trees
Raised families of trees, and they
As proud as we tossed their heads
In the wind and flung good seeds away
The sun was hot and the sun was bright
Down in the valley below
Where people, starved and hungry for life
So empty, come and go
[Verse 5]
There in the shade and hid from the sun
We freed our minds and learned
Our greatest reason for being here
Our bodies moved and burned
There on our mountain bed of leaves
We learned life’s reason why
People laugh and love and dream
They fight, they hate to die
[Verse 6]
The smell of your hair, I know is still there
If most of our leaves are blown
Our words still ring in the brush and the trees
Where singing seeds are sown
Your shape and form is dim but plain
There on our mountain bed
I see my life was brightest
Where you laughed and laid your head
[Verse 7]
I learned the reason why man must work
And how to dream big dreams
To conquer time and space and fight
For rivers and the seas
I stand here filled with my emptiness now
And look at city and land
And I know why farms and cities are built
By hot, warm, nervous hands
[Verse 8]
I crossed many states just to stand here now
My face all hot with tears
I crossed city and valley
Desert and stream, to bring my body here
My history and future blaze bright in me
And all my joy and pain
Go through my head on our mountain bed
Where I smell your hair again
[Verse 9]
All this day long, I linger here
And on in through the night
My greeds, desires, my cravings, hopes
My dreams inside me fight
My loneliness healed, my emptiness filled
I walk above all pain
Back to the breast of my woman
And child to scatter my seeds again