This One’s For the Hippies (to Misty)

This is one for the hippies,
Derided for their passion,
Who warned about climate change
Forty years before the fashion.

Who couldn't get into clubs
Even when they rarely had a dollar –
Blokes ejected at the door
If their hair even touched their collar.

Men and women bashed on city streets
Because of their flamboyance
And love of life and Nature,
For their precognition and clairvoyance.

Let's hear it for the hippies
For decades taken for granted
And mocked because they called this globe
Not 'the world', but 'your precious Planet'.

This one's for the hippies
Society's whipping boy.
This one's for the hippies
Who bosses wouldn’t employ.

It's for those who talked of cycle power,
Alternative fuels, and co-ops for food.
Who sweated to make workers' co-ops,
And land co-ops … not that it did much good.

Who could see that every suburban block
Didn't need fifty washing machines.
Who believed in evolution
While Neanderthals vented their spleen.

Those who accepted being the laughingstock
Because they knew we must save the trees,
And, decades before governments announced it,
Exclaimed, "You’ve nearly killed the seas!".

So this one's for the hippies,
Who were 99 per cent right –
And it's to the five per cent of them
Who stayed true and didn’t shirk the fight.

To those who conspire and dream and scheme
And for humanity spend their lives,
And who generally die well burnt-out,
From unpaid activism, around about sixty-five.

So this one's for the hippies
Who, the older that they get
See daily vindication in every nation,
With immense pride, far too busy for regret.

Categories: hippie, yippie, alternative