Bad Poetry: Love Is an Old Song

I promised someone a poem. I've not written a new one but here, in honor of the Hallmark Holiday, is the full text of a song...Each of the verses has a different tune. If you’re a baby-boomer, the words will convey that tune to you. This is quite a performance piece but it’s fun to sing, even if your truelove's hair is white. (Come to that, I seem to remember a vintage parody about "red red RED was the color of my truelove's hair..." Whatever. If you know the tune(s), feel free to folk-process that line as you like.)

Love is an old song that you and I have sung many times before,

Back in the days when our world needed love-sweet-love not war.

Love is like a butterfly. Love is a rose.

Love is sunshine on your shoulder. Love is a mountain stream that flows.

(chorus)

Love is teasing and love is pleasing, and love is pleasure, at least when new.

As love grows older, it may grow colder—it may grow bolder, too.

Love should flow, and love should grow, and love should be strong,

Carry us back to where we started from, before we went wrong.

Love is an old, old song.

Love sees all things lovely, and love makes us kind.

We’d like to teach the world to sing the songs love lets us find.

(Think you saw me with another? Then just let your folly be;

You know I think more of your little finger than of his whole body)...

Love is moonlight on a June night, honeysuckle on the breeze.

Love is fine long summer days and apples on the trees.

Black is the color of your hair, and the colors that you bring,

Like the flowers of the summer woods, are a many-splendored thing.

One more spin on the merry-go-round! There’s no one like you.

The days when I don’t see you, the whole world turns misty blue.

For all the years we’ve lived apart, only you can stop the rain,

Reverse the hourglass of time, make me feel twenty-five again.

(Now this post needs an Amazon link. Hmmm...In honor of Anti-Valentines Day, why not a novel from a science-fiction future where everyone understands that  Romantic Love, or "Romeo & Juliet Syndrome," is a sort of childhood disease, in no way to be confused with the love of real Partners for Life. Here's the first three of what eventually became eight novels from that future. The cover, not chosen or approved by the author, reflects the way sf was marketed at the time...that's not the way I would have visualized the poetry slam scene.)