Darby's Castle

(Kris Kristofferson)



See the ruin on the hill

Where the smoke is hanging still

Like an echo of an age long forgotten

There's a story of a home

Crushed beneath those blackened stones

And the roof that fell before the beans were rotten.



Seems oldl Darby loved his wife

And he laboured all his life

To provide her with material possessions

And he built for her a home

Of the finest wood and stone

And the building soon became his sole obsession.



Oh, it took three hundred days

For the timber to be raised

And the silhouette was seen for miles around

And the gables reached as high

As the eagles in the sky

But it only took one night to bring it down

When Darby's castle tumbled to the ground.



Though the shared a common bed

There was precious little said

In the moments that were set aside for sleeping

For his busy dreams were filled

With the rooms he'd yet to build

And he never heard young Helen Darby weeping.



Then one night he heard a sound

As he laid his pencil down

And he traced it to her door and turned the handle

And the pale light of the moon

Through the windows of the room

Split the shadows where two bodies lay entangled.



Oh, it took three hundred days

For the timber to be raised

And the silhouette was seen for miles around

And the gables reached as high

As the eagles in the sky

But it only took one night to bring it down,

When Darby's castle tumbled to the ground...