Song for the Old Men

Keith Michael Roberts, copyright 1970 - .

Sing a song for the old men,
teeth gone and wrinkly skin,
they're looking just like children in the park.

Where pigeons sail in the fall breeze
as the pages of Autumn tear from the trees,
baggy pants on bony knees
reveal the shrinking refugees.

Tell me all about the good old days.
Were they all that good?
Would you want to go there again.
if you only could?

Sing a song for the old men,
too stubborn to break, too brittle to bend.
Their daydreams filled with long-dead friends.
Is this the way the story ends?

Too few days and too much time,
neighborhood gangs and welfare lines
where rusty soldiers spit in the breeze
in the face of the 1970's.

Tell me all about the good old days.
Were they all that good?
Would you want to go there again,
if you only could?

My first day of school I was only four.
At eighteen I left to go off to war.
So happy was I to come home alive
that I stayed in the army 'till I was sixty-five.

But I can clearly remember 1923,
the year that I married dear Emily;
and that cold limousine back in seventy-four
when she left me to wonder just what is life for.

Sing a song for the old men,
too set in their ways to be happy again,
as hour by hour and day after day,
the TV steals their lives away.

Sing a song for the old men,
in a world that seems content to pretend
that they're looking just like children in the park.

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