- The Ghost Pines
Fire and Rain
There once was a boy
Who left home to find
The land of his dreams
Where the people were kind
He walked forty days
He walked forty nights
He passed through a maze
Of earthly delights
In the heart of that land
He heard a voice
It spoke like the thunder
And it left him no choice
It said “The answers you seek
Can’t be found down below
You must climb yonder peak
To learn what I know”
So from the foot of the mountain
The boy started to climb
But the sky turned coal-black
And he lost all sense of time
Was it a night or a day?
The rain started to fall
Valleys turned into graves
The flood buried it all
As the boy neared the summit
The rain turned into snow
The thunder was rolling
And the wind began to blow
He felt the death-cold
Like a knife in his chest
He willed his knees not to fold
So he could finish his quest
At the top of the peak
A lonely pine held its ground
While off in the distance
The sea rose all around
And the young boy wept
It seemed the thunder had lied
He’d learned nothing except
What it feels like to die
His life ebbing away
Nothing left but his name
The boy saw through his tears
As the tree burst into flame
The fire heating his bones
The boy lay down his head
And though he was alone
The thunder’s voice said
(C) Fire and rain have come around again
Darkness from the light
Love and pain both must have an end
So that new life can rise
There once was a girl
Who returned home to find
The land that she loved
And that she’d left behind
Five years ago
She’d thought she knew what was best
She’d felt the call of the road
Like a bird in her chest
So on a bright summer day
She took to the sky
And let the wings of her heart
Teach her how to fly
But from the Chinese wall
To the hilltops of Rome
She loved nothing she saw
Like the forests of home
So her heart flew her back
And she returned to her trees
She nodded off by a lake
Rocked to sleep by the breeze
But sweet dreams turned to dread
When she awoke
To find the sky glowed hell-red
And her lungs full of smoke
The fire raged all around
She heard it eating her trees
The death-wail of the forest
Drove her to her knees
She knew she had to go
Before her courage could break
So as the ash fell like snow
She crawled to the lake
In water up to her waist
In the heart of the blaze
She watched her world burn
Black tears dried on her face
Because she knew what we’d done
We’d taken nature for granted
We’d loaded the gun
By taking more than we’d planted
And now the bill had come due
A price we couldn’t pay
We’d traded all our tomorrows
For one golden today
The girl took a deep breath
The flames roared overhead
As she dove down to the depths
The fire’s voice said
(C)
There once was a man
Who couldn’t find
A way out of the maze
His life had made of his mind
Back when he was a boy
He’d built the first wall
A fight over a toy
Beaten up for a ball
So he learned early on
To hide his feelings away
To never show weakness
To never have much to say
He sat alone at his school
He couldn’t make any friends
At home his brothers were cruel
He wondered when it would end
As the years passed him by
His walls grew taller and taller
All alone in his maze
His life shrank smaller and smaller
He spent his weeks on the phone
His cubicle like a cell
His coworkers all drones
Forty hours of hell
He burned up his weekends
Working alone night and day
On books no one would read
On songs he’d never play
Women came and they went
But love passed him by
His heart was too bent
His walls were too high
One day the walls grew so high
That they blocked out the sun
And his heart grew as cold as
The steel of a gun
He felt trapped in his maze
With no way to escape
From the march of his days
A cycle that wouldn’t break
But maybe there was a way
And end to this life
He watched his reflection
In the blade of a knife
And as he studied the blade
He heard a voice
“Is this an end or beginning?
You must make your own choice”
(C)
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