by Joni Mitchell

Everybody looks so ill at ease
So distrustful so displeased
Running down the table
I see a borderline
Like a barbed wire fence
Strung tight strung tense
Prickling with pretense
A borderline

Why are you smirking at your friend?
Is this to be the night when
All well-wishing ends?
All credibility revoked?
Thin skin thick jokes!
Can we blame it on the smoke,
This borderline?

Every bristling shaft of pride
Church or nation
Team or tribe
Every notion we subscribe to
Is just a borderline
Good or bad we think we know
As if thinking makes things so!
All convictions grow along a borderline

Smug in your jaded expertise
You scathe the wonder world
And you praise barbarity
In this illusionary place
This scared hard-edged rat race
All liberty is laced with
Borderlines

Every income every age
Every fashion-plated rage
Every measure every gauge
Creates a borderline
Every stone thrown through glass
Every mean-streets-kick ass
Every swan caught on the grass
Will draw a borderline

You snipe so steady
You snub so snide
So ripe and ready
To diminish and deride!
You’re so quick to condescend
My opinionated friend
All you deface all you defend
Is just a borderline
Just a borderline
Another borderline
Just a borderline

© 1994; Crazy Crow Music

I wake with the sun
And walk amidst everything
she has rinsed in rose gold

I smile as the grass bends to wave hello
The wind pirouettes
And graciously sends
A soulful breeze
Through emerald trees
Whose clapping leaves
With smooth edges
And perfect pleats
make it so
I am touched by the trees

Yet it is the yellowness of the flowers
that makes my heart take a knee

When I witness daffodils rejoicing
with their stems stretching
Whose perfectly petalled faces
Are upturned in praise
Beneath a buttery sun
The best preacher there ever was.

My hearts’ hymn is Hallelujah
My soul is in full bloom
As my body flowers into the Spring of its life

For I feel
And I see
And I know
I am as rich as I will ever need to be

For how generous are the daffodils
in their fields of charity

Glittering like gems
Gleaming like gold
Giving all their riches away for free.

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?