Key: Ab major
Verse 1
G
When I see birches bent to left and right across
F
G
the lines of straighter, darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging
them.
But swinging doesn't bend
ice a sunny winter morning after a rain.
They click upon themselves as the
Em
G
G
breeze rises an d turn many -colored
as the stir cracks and crazes
their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells,
shattering and avalanching on the
snow crust.
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away,
you'd think the inner dome of
heaven had fallen.
E
Em
They are dragged to the withered bracken by
not to break.
they never right themselves.
You may see their trunks arching in the woods years afterward,
G
F#
the ground like girls on hands and knees that throw
F
G
their hair before them over their heads
to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say,
G
fact about the ice storm, I should prefer to have
Am
F
had some boy bend them as he went
some boy too far from town to learn baseball, whose only
play was what he found himself summer or
F
G
winter and could play alone.
One by one he subdued
G
over and over again until he took the stiffness
out of them and not one but hung limp,
not one was left for him to conquer.
Bm
He learned
Am
A
all there was to learn about not launching out
F
G
too soon and so not carrying the tree
away clear to the ground.
He always kept his poise to the top branches,
climbing carefully,
A
Am
with the same pains you used to fill a cup up to
Then
G
ground.
A
G
So was I once myself a swinger of birches,
and so I dream of going back to be.
It's
A
G
when I'm weary of considerations and life is too much
like a pathless wood where your
F
G
face burns and tickles with the cobwebs broken
across it and one eye is weeping from the
Am
twigs having lashed across it open. I'd like to get
G
Am
away from earth a while and then
May no fate willfully misunderstand
G
what I wish and snatch me away not to return earth's
G
know where it's likely to go better. I'd like to go by
black branches up a snow -white trunk toward
heaven till the tree could bear no more but
dipped its top and set me down
again.
How did you like the song?
TunerE A D G B E
ChordsG F D Em E...
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