The Last Day of June 1934

The morning is humming, it's a quarter past nine I should be working down in the vines But I'm lying here with a good friend of mine Watching the sun in her hair I pick the grapes from the hills to the sea The fields of France are a home to me Ah, but today lying here is a good place to be I can't go anywhere But as we slip in and out of embrace Like some old and familiar place Reflecting all of my dreams in her face like before On the last day of June 1934 Just out of Cambridge in a narrow country lane A bottle-green Bentley in the driving rain Slips and skids round a corner, then pulls straight again Heads up the drive to the door The lights of the party shine over the fields Where lovers and dancers watch Catherine wheels And argue realities digging their heels In a world that's finished with war And a lost wind of summer blows into the streets Past the tramps in the alleyways, the rich in silk sheets And Europe lies sleeping, You feel her heartbeats through the floor On the last day of June nineteenth On the night that Ernst Roehm died voices rang out In the rolling Bavarian hills And swept through the cities and danced in the gutters Grown strong like the joining of wills Oh echoed away like a roar in the distance In moonlight carved out of steel Singing "All the lonely, so long and so long You don't know how I long, how I long You can't hold me, I'm strong now I'm strong Stronger than your law" I sit here now by the banks of the Rhine Dipping my feet in the cold stream of time And I know I'm a dreamer, I know I'm out of line With the people I see everywhere The couples pass by me, they're looking so good Their arms round each other, they head for the woods They don't care who Ernst Roehm was, no reason they should Just a shadow that hangs in the air But I thought I saw him cross over the hill With a whole ghostly army of men at his heel And struck in the moment it seemed to be real like before On the last day of June nineteen thirty four --- The Last Day of June 1934 - Al Stewart