The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #102943 Message #3871080
Posted By: Rog Peek
11-Aug-17 - 06:00 PM
Thread Name: Songs for/about Phil Ochs
Subject: RE: Songs for/about Phil Ochs
ONE NIGHT LATE (Jim Clark)
I heard Phil Ochs on internet radio One night late as I worked from my home In an outlying province of the old imperial Lost and forsaken U. S. of A.
And Richard FariƱa was harmonizing sweetly To a song that I knew but had never heard In the pre-dawn light of the millennial morning I scratched these words on the back of a bill
Chorus: Loaves and fishes and horses and wishes The virgins go begging to the cold-hearted bridegroom If Jesus was here he'd climb back on the cross He'd walk straight back in the shadows of the tomb
Now it's thirty springs since the chair and the belt And forty dark years on a fast motorbike The country you loved is a dream you took with you Now it's monkeys and demons and the ghost of John Train
Where men of the cloth preach murder and hate And leaders are liars who prove war is peace One nation under a vengeful God Whose son disappeared on the road to right now Chorus
A mourning dove sang from a bush by my window As a squad of Blackhawks roared up from the south They're practicing up for their appointment in Samarra Then all was quiet, the bird it had flown Chorus Repeat last two lines.
Notes:-Jim said about the song -'One Night Late' is an original song I included as a CD single with my 2007 book NOTIONS- A JIM CLARK MISCELLANY. The book includes an essay, 'Tongue-Tied, with Sore Fingertips, and Little to Show,' about the writing of the song." Song and essay can be found on jimclarkpoet.com.