Country Joe McDonald - Forward lyrics

I've tinkered at my bits of rhymes In weary, woeful, waiting times; And doleful hours of battle-din Ere yet they brought the wounded in; Through vigils of the fateful nights In lousy barns by candle-light; And dug-outs, sagging and aflood On stretchers stiff and bleared with blood; By ragged grove, by ruined road By hearths accursed where love abode By broken altars, blackened shrines I've tinkered at my bits of rhymes I've solaced me with scraps of song The desolated ways along: Through sickly fields all shrapnel-sown And meadows reaped by d**h alone; By blazing cross and splintered spire By headless Virgin in the mire; By gardens gashed amid their bloom By guttered grave, by shattered tomb; Beside the dying and the dead Where rocket green and rocket red In trembling pools of poising light With flowers of flame festoon the night Ah me! by what dark ways of wrong I've cheered my heart with scraps of song So here's my sheaf of war-won verse And some is bad, and some is worse And if at times I curse a bit You needn't read that part of it; For through it all like horror runs The red resentment of the guns And you yourself would mutter when You took the things that once were men And sped them through that zone of hate To where the dripping surgeons wait; And wonder too if in God's sight War ever, ever, can be right Yet may it not be, crime and war But efforts misdirected are And if there's good in war and crime There may be in my bits of rhyme My songs from out the slaughter mill: So take or leave them as you will