Bye, Bye, Big Blue

If you were a bird, if you were a buffalo

They'd paint your silhouette against the sky

Gather your bones on the day you died

And hold them up with tears and cries

To mourn forever more

And there were those who were glad to see you go

All the ones with their eyes on a golden past

Who turned their backs while you breathed your last

Who would rather view a nation through a parting glass

Than watch the hot steel pour

Bye, bye, Big Blue,

Now your working days are through

You stood too proud, you stood too long

Heard too many hammers ringing out their song

And if I had a hammer I would right your wrong

With one stroke bold and true

Bye, bye, Big Blue

The forge was father to the furnace

The clachan child was father to the steel age man

Who wed the song of science to the lore of the land

Shaped the soul of the lowlands with a moulder's hand

And a spirit none could tame

And his heart came to be burnished

In shipyard, in mine, in bothy and in byre

Who trusted it to workers who would never tire

And they welded it to Scotland with the brightest fire

In the history of flame

Do they never think to count the cost for us?

Broken promises discarded in the dust

How many lives sacrificed to trust

And how cold the calculation

Of a hard humiliation

That leaves only sentiment and rust

Bye, bye, Big Blue

As I walk the streets that surround you

I think of the talk of a nation once again

In a hard-headed steel town defiant in the rain

No paradise lost but what could there be to gain

For the likes of me and you?

I'll be there when the wreckers gather round you

When the fire that built you brings you to your knees

But the torch and the cutter will pay no heed to me

And when I look up to the sky all that I will see

Will be the wrong shade of blue