And the seasons they go round and round

[sovay]

Rabbit, rabbit! I've never seen them because of the fence around their patio and the lilac tree and other shrubs growing on both sides of the division between properties, but the children next door sing on sunny days. Some of their songs I've recognized from children's games that I hadn't realized were still part of schoolyard or playground culture, some are completely unknown to me. Today's had a bouncy, repetitive rhythm with intermittent internal rhymes and a sing-song tune in which different years went by like a counting game. I couldn't make out all of the lyrics: once I was twenty years old . . . soon we'll be thirty years old . . . I'm still learning about life . . . sing them all my songs and tell them all my stories . . . soon I'll be sixty years old. I became curious and threw a couple of the above phrases into Google.

They were singing Lukas Graham's "7 Years."

They're still singing it, in fact, a kind of endless round of years, seven to sixty and back again. I can't call this out as weird at all. I came away from elementary school with a number of formative folk songs, but one I remember singing repeatedly underneath the little stretch of crabapple trees down the side of the schoolyard, turning to clasp hands with the friend I made after second grade, was Joni Mitchell's "The Circle Game."

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks for both those links, and for the children.

I'm sure I've posted it before, but I've always liked Judith Wright's poem, 'Counting in Sevens', as a variation on this theme:

Seven ones are seven.
I can't remember that year
Or what presents I was given.

Seven twos are fourteen.
That year I found my mind,
Swore not to be what I had been.

Seven threes are twenty-one.
I was sailing my own sea,
First in love, the knots undone.

Seven fours are twenty-eight;
Three false starts had come and gone;
My true love came, and not too late.

Seven fives are thirty-five.
In her cot my daughter lay,
Real, miraculous, alive.

Seven sixes are forty-two.
I packed her sandwiches for school,
I loved my love and time came true.

Seven sevens are forty-nine.
Fruit loaded down my apple tree,
Near fifty years of life were mine.

Seven eights are fifty-six.
My lips still cold from a last kiss,
My fire was ash and charcoal-sticks.

Seven nines are sixty-three; seven tens are seventy.
Who would that old woman be?
She will remember being me,
But what she is I cannot see.

Yet with every added seven.
Some strange present I was given.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Thank you for looking it up-- I could hear it and was wondering what it was, but I couldn't actually make out the lyrics well enough to Google.

[ewein2412]

that is so damn cool.