Missouri birds flying over old St Louis
Hear that song they're singing to me,
Go into the world while you're young.
But the preacher's word echoes from the old church steeple,
Stay here with the decent people,
Settle down and marry while you're young.
Oh, will you wait for me?
If I go into the world, Susanna,
I'll come back and tell you what I've seen.
The seeds of change float across the churchyard to me.
Tombstone faces see right through me.
Today's so soon tomorow and you're old.
Missouri birds flying over old St. Louis.
Hear that song they're singing to me,
Go into the world while you're young.
All lyrics copyright john Stewart
This song meditates on the impossiblitiy of returning to the past. The birds (high and unreachable) represent messages sent from the past ('songs of youth'). This causes the singer to remember his words to Susanna - that she would wait until he returned. The middle section makes it clear that any return would only reveal change and death. The preacher's voice echoes from the past and is carried on the wind - but it's as distant as the birds. His advice to stay is ironically set against the transience of the wind that carries them. Ultimately only the gravestones of the church and the steeple last. These are the concrete counterparts of the New York cityscape intimated in the title track. These also have the 'deadness' of the inanimate. Yet they also have personal connotations - through memory. It's up to the messages of the wind (the poet's imagination) to recreate the past. Places from the past can be returned too - and through this a connection to the past, if only through memory (and the remembrance of his descendant's). Displacement through space can be conquered physically, time though only through the imagination.