Summer Of Love, Plus Fifty Poem by John F. McCullagh

By the time I got to Woodstock, I was pushing Sixty-five.
I was qualified for Medicare when I finally arrived.
All the famous bands that played there, by and large, they are no more.
You can hear them still on vinyl; just not at the record store.
It was mud and drunken nakedness in the summer of sixty-nine.
There were psycho-active drugs too if you were so inclined.
All the gorgeous girls who made that scene back in Love's own summer,
Now use Clairol to hide the gray and are somebody's Grandmother.
And what about the tall lean dudes who lusted for them then?
They now rely on small blue pills to get it up again.
Imagine standing on that stage staring out at the tie-dyed throng
as Janice Joplin poured her heart and soul out in a song.
I hear Hendrix was electric even as the skies did pour.
And Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were up for an encore.
Lennon couldn't make it and Jethro Tull declined.
Joan Baez was magical; Joni Mitchell would have cried.
They are but ghostly echoes now, playing to an empty field.
We were all once young and beautiful, and Love was true and real.
Still, Time is a heartless arrow, relentless now as then.
I only fooled myself to think I could go back again.