MAX HATT / EDDA GLASS

Lyrics

OCEAN OF BIRDS
Go way, go way— don’t you stand on my porch, sound the creak of every board. Now our work is though— no more letters to write for you. We have sent for your bride, and I’m happy for you. And I’m married to that school, more children than any wife’s womb. You were looking for a hand neater than your farmer man’s, to write yourself a wife, from the far’way motherland. There’s no fear as long and wide as pulls the eyes of a young widower with two girls left to raise. They came to me too— you know how May talks a blue, and Sue she just drew.

I’ll stay I’ll stay, on that place where the hardwood speaks, and those birds come to feed. Thirty years I’ve strived, to reach such an age that the wives become too kind, to ask me which young man’s mine. I remember our first crisis sent you running to me— when your bride wrote her doubts— how could she live without the sea? I said write her of September, and the roll and roar of grain— Promise her fields wide where rise murmurs: oceans of birds, flying south while we made do with ourselves. And word travels slow, let it go, like snow, into the sea.

Go way, go way, oh how these plains, eat up all we might say, now it’s much too late. You’re a man of one word, and she’s come all of this way. And so she turned out to be plain, but at least she must be brave. You said I’m “like a sister,” on this most blessed of days,
as if we were also bound, as if I might hang around. And now it is September, send those growing girls around. Oh aunt honey, how come you never come on down? And this old aunt she said, winter sure is coming on. And old aunt said she’s got this ocean of birds that she’s got to feed.

℗© 2021 Max Hatt / Edda Glass
Composition: Max Hatt
Lyrics: Edda Glass