Whenever I hear Neil Young
It’s always a country fair after sunset and the lights
of rides turning on one-by-one, twinkling
in harmony with a watermelon sky spilling sugar-
pink into clouds jet, gold, silver-lined.
It’s shooting-stars, still hurricane time, approaching
autumn, a fork in the road.
Couples rise in the sky on the turning wheel,
others tilt-and-whirl through calliope music.
Under the tent, the band plays. All Neil Young.
Some drift away. She wants to stay and dance.
He wants to slip between the parked cars,
down to the river, lay in golden-rod blaze…
Upstream, downstream, trickles of laughter,
tambourines, and everybody’s twenty
and dreaming of that mountain where songs disarm,
and blood turns to wine and war is as gone
as summer’s milkweed floating past the latitudes.
America! Your Virgil of northern skies, your Cupid in plaid,
Neil watches over the scene, smiles
from his castle-on-a cloud, at the pastoral, the hormonal,
the colors and counter-colors, the lovers
on their rides hooked out to stars, this one turning
that one coming ‘round.
Music’s swirling, girls girling ‘round young knights
jamming on air guitar,
leaning on their denim, leaning on their cars—
wooing cinnamon knees and paisley flowers
to the torn patchwork bibles of their jeans.
America! Your drummers are drumming, your guitars
are playing, your archers are singing,
Your harmonies rise, curve, and like archers’ arrows,
fall in a single rain.
What is harmony but near collision?
Sweet swerve, then a spin into alignment—
notes held as the body wishes to be
pulled by the moon through amplified air
along the curve of the earth in tremolo…
a guitar turned on edge like a wing,
or the tail of a comet swept behind by speed—
America…
I wonder, will you,
how in the world will you,
hold the parts together?
When the castle is primal
and the mortar is sugar and the sugar
is loosening,
& we’re all just a bunch of kids?
Dedicated to Neil Young on the occasion of his 80th birthday, Nov. 12, 2025
Check out his latest information here: https://neilyoung.warnerrecords.com/
Enjoy some of our previous coverage here: REVIEW: “Harvest (50th Anniversary Edition)” by Neil Young