Bird of Passage

The song which has been pestering me has finally taken shape.

I have been living in this part of the web for a couple of months now, putting off the reorganisation of my personal website. I feel like a lazy teenager unwilling to tidy my room. So I will let this first rough version loose here.
I am fascinated by the relationship between lyrics and poetry. I am the first to admit that they are not the same. The music and the movement of the chords add to the accents and stresses that are in the text to form the whole. I am not sure that they should have a separate existence.
With this song, the melody and chords arrived first, and then I wrote the lyrics, but when I actually came to sing the song, the lyrics had to take their chance with the phrasing that the music imposed…or something like that.

Here are the lyrics:

You are a bird of passage
And I know that nothing lasts,
But I still want to roost one night in your tree.
I’ll spin in the air and fly with you,
Reel up and down the sky with you,
Dance with you and have you dance with me.

The moments and minutes and seconds and hours
All slip through my fingers so fast.
And just when the future turns into the present,
It all fades away to the past.

You are a ship that’s passing
And I know that nothing lasts,
But I’d still like to sail awhile in your sea.
I’ll dive deep below the surface
And swim with the whales and turtles
Drown in you and have you drown in me.

But here is what happened to it when I sang it… Bird of Passage