Reply #3: Palaces of Gold

[greendog]

Song by Leon Rosselson.
Performance by Martin Carthy.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=junPQP4kBQs

PALACES OF GOLD

(Leon Rosselson)

If the sons of company directors,
and the judges' private daughters,
had to got to school in a slum school,
dumped by some joker in a damp back alley,
had to herd into classrooms cramped with worry,
with a view onto slag heaps and stagnant pools,
had to file through corridors grey with age,
and play in a crack-pot concrete cage.

Buttons would be pressed,
rules would be broken.
Strings would be pulled
and magic words spoken.
Invisible fingers would mould
palaces of gold.



If prime ministers and advertising executives,
Royal personages and bank managers' wives
had to live out their lives in dark rooms,
blinded by smoke and the foul air of sewers.
Rot on the walls and rats in the cellars,
in rows of dumb houses like mouldering tombs.
Had to bring up their children and watch them grow
in a wasteland of dead streets where nothing will grow.

I'm not suggesting any sort of plot,
everyone knows, there's not,
but you unborn millions might like to be warned
that if you don't want to be buried alive by slagheaps,
pitfalls and damp walls and rat traps and dead streets,
arrange to be democratically born
the son of a company director
or a judge's private daughter.