Lyrics Of My Youth: Bethel Island

Tryin to find my way to Bethel Island
Someone once told me it was nice
Though I don’t know how to get there
I think if I head north I’ll be all right

Shadows growing taller
Fall across the dusty roadside
While twilight thumbs a ride home
To his summer bride
Nightime paints the concrete fields
With magic velvet darkness
And with her sweeping hands
She makes my dreams

They tell me a river flows around the island
That it has no beginning and no end
There are golden trees with golden leaves
And endless golden days
I’m headed there
I don’t know where
My heart will find the way

Sunrise calls softly now
To wake me from my slumber
Warm and dappled sunlight fills my mind
And if morning is my lover
Then I shall need no other
I shall need no other
All of my days

~~~~~
From March 1973
Bethel Island, CA, in the Sacramento River Delta is a real place.

Lyrics Of My Youth

Somewhere back in the early 1970s, I fancied myself a songwriter and folksinger. I recently unearthed some lyrics and music sheets from those times, and I wondered: Where did that strange young woman go with her poems and her dreams? What would I think of her if I met her now?

In James Joyce's Ulysses, the character Stephan Dedalus ponders: "My childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tryants willing to be dethroned."

And so I am posting some of my old lyrics here, bringing them forth from their weary and dark and secret palace, into the light of this new millennium. And I am finding in those old lyrics a few moments of charm and beauty and magic still.

I share them here with an older, and wearier world. Perhaps that strange young woman who journeyed so far in her dreams would smile.

Lyrics Of My Youth

Bethel Island

Lyrics Of My Youth

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