The Song

 Oh, the year was 1966 I climbed that tower again, pulling guard at Spandau in the city of Berlin.   From another century, the buildings looked so old.  A 50-acre compound to imprison three lost souls.  They locked us in the towers, I thought that kind of strange, since none of us had plans to leave, but the rules could not be changed.  I served my tour of duty, it wasn't very hard, but I felt as much a prisoner as that man down in the yard.

Chorus:  We all build our own prisons, it's the same for me and you.  We build them out of deeds we've done and deeds we meant to do.  We all are our own jailers, the keeper of the key, and the only liberator who can set the captive free.

His war was getting over with when I was being born, but the victors write the history books and he'd done something wrong.  And now my war was raging, but I was not in the fray.  I served my time in Germany, half a world away.  He always kept a garden, he kept it by himself.  His other fellow prisoners never gave him any help.  It must have made the time go by as he worked from spring to fall and thought about the girl who waited just outside the wall.

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The garden was impressive, the part that I could see.  In it were some fruit trees about as old as me.  They said it looked much better a year ago or so, but he was getting out this year, so he'd kind of let it go.  We never saw the other two, they always stayed inside.  For all intents and purposes, they had already died.  But this one had his garden and the girl he hoped see.  For all intents and purposes, he was already free.

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A plane took off from Tempelhof, which must have been nearby, a 727 climbing sharply through the sky.  The prisoner stopped his gardening and leaned upon his hoe, and I wondered what he thought about as he watched that jet plane go.  Today I still remember him and the way he watched that plane, and I think of him whenever I hear "The Early Morning Rain".  I understand he was released shortly after me, but Albert Speer served 20 years, and I served only three.

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