Song information On this page you can read the lyrics of the song Gavin's Woodpile , by - Bruce Cockburn. Song from the album In The Falling Dark, in the genre Release date: 31.08.1976
Record label: High Romance, True North
Song language: English
Gavin's Woodpile |
| Working out on Gavin’s woodpile |
| safe within the harmony of kin |
| visions begin to crowd my eyes |
| like a meteor shower in the autumn skies |
| and the soil beneath me seems to moan |
| with a sound like the wind through a hollow bone |
| and my mind fills with figures like Lappish runes of power… |
| And log slams on rough-hewn log |
| and a voice from somewhere scolds a barking dog. |
| I remember a bleak-eyed prisoner |
| in the Stoney Mountain life-suspension home |
| you drink and fight and damage someone |
| and they throw you away for some years of boredom |
| one year done and five more to go -- |
| no job waiting so no parole |
| and over and over they tell you that you’re nothing… |
| And I toss another log on Gavin’s woodpile |
| and wonder at the lamp-warm window’s welcome smile. |
| I remember crackling embers |
| coloured windows shining through the rain |
| like the coloured slicks on the English River |
| death in the marrow and death in the liver |
| and some government gambler with his mouth full of steak |
| saying «if you can’t eat the fish, fish in some other lake. |
| To watch a people die -- it is no new thing. |
| «and the stack of wood grows higher and higher |
| and a helpless rage seems to set my brain on fire. |
| And everywhere the free space fills |
| like a punctured diving suit and I’m |
| paralyzed in the face of it all |
| cursed with the curse of these modern times |
| Distant mountains, blue and liquid, |
| luminous like a thickening of sky |
| flash in my mind like a stairway to life -- |
| a train whistle cuts through the scene like a knife |
| three hawks wheel in a dazzling sky -- |
| a slow motion jet makes them look like a lie |
| and I’m left to conclude there’s no human answer near… |
| But there’s a narrow path to a life to come |
| that explodes into sight with the power of the sun. |
| A mist rises as the sun goes down |
| and the light that’s left forms a kind of crown |
| the earth is bread, the sun is wine |
| it’s a sign of a hope that’s ours for all time. |
| (Burritt's Rapids 17/11/75) |
| (* «Lappish runes» -- Lapp Shamans covered their drums with striking magical |
| symbols, which were then used to divine, contact spirits, etc.) |
| (* «English River» -- river system in north-western Ontario, polluted with |
| mercury for the next hundred years by the Reid paper company. |
| Nobody is doing |
| much about the fact that the native people who live along its course have lost |
| both food and liveliho |