Remember the mountain bed lyrics

Artist  : Billy bragg 
Song : Remember the mountain bed
 
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.

Rosin smells and turpentine smells from
eucalyptus and pine
Bitter tastes of twigs we chewed where tangled
woodvines 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.

Your arm was brown against the ground, your
cheeks part of the sky,
As your fingers played with grassy moss, and
limber did you 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.

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.

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
The people laugh and love and dream, they fight,
they hate to die.

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...

I learned the reason why man must work and how to
dream big dreams,
To conquer time and space and fight the 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.

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.

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 breasts of my woman and child to
scatter my seeds again.

Words: woody guthrie (1944) -
Music: jeff tweedy/jay bennett (1999)

Leroy bach: piano
Jay bennett: organ, nylon-string guitar, backing
vocal
Ken coomer: drums
John stirratt: bass, backing vocal
Jeff tweedy: vocal, acoustic guitar