The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is:
What’s a song lyric that has stuck with you forever?

This is one prompt that I could answer a few different ways.

A couple of contenders would be:

• “Hello darkness my old friend.
  I’ve come to talk with you again.” (Sound of Silence by Simon & Garfunkle, 1966),
• “A voice on the radio says ‘another one’s down.
  It doesn’t matter anymore which side he’s on.’” (Missing by Johnny Clegg and Savuka, 1987).

But the one that I keep coming back to, and honestly, the first one that I thought of, is from Jungleland (1975) by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Having described a night of gang warfare and fleeting romance in incredibly poetic terms, near the end of the song, Bruce sings, “And the poets down here don’t write nothing at all. They just stand back and let it all be.”

This lyric spun my head for a couple of reasons.

First, the idea that being a poet wasn’t some ivory tower, faux intellectual stance, but something that would be shared across all economic classes. Even me, the son of a factory worker, could aspire to be a poet.

Secondly, the idea that poetry changes society. If poets could ‘stand back and let it all be,” then they were using some level of judgement and discretion about when they should intervene in society.

This felt reassuring to teenaged me, that there were thought leaders out there deciding when to and when not to course correct society. and better yet, these thought leaders weren’t politicians or millionaires (don’t know if we had billionaires back then, probably a few, but we definitely didn’t have trillionaires).

They were artistic people, creative people like me.

This was optimistic, somehow. This was how I wanted the world to work.

An alternative lyric that also influenced me a lot, and also from Springsteen is in Badlands (1978), “poor man wants to be rich. Rich man wants to be king. King ain’t satisifed until he rules everything.” A much more realistic view of the world.