Malvina Reynolds: Song Lyrics and Poems  

Notes: words and music by Malvina Reynolds; copyright 1959 Schroder Music Company, renewed 1987.

There'll come a time the smog will be so thick,
We'll all have to walk with a long white walking stick.
But we won't walk anyhow, we'll go by air,
And the helicopters will be so thick we won't get anywhere.

Chorus:
There'll come a time, believe me son,
And when that day is here I will be gone.

Such adulteration will have hit the food,
You'll throw away the contents and eat the carton if you want anything good,
And women will live on synthetic meals,
And they'll all be slender as synthetic eels.

(Chorus)

There'll come a time the kids will be so smart
They'll be able to recite their own psychoanalysis by heart,
And they'll all be scientists by the time they're ten,
And thank the Lord I won't have any children then.

(Chorus)

The cities will be so overpopulated
We'll all be buried from the same apartment house where we were created,
And if you take a trip to the country somewhere,
You'll have to be inoculated against fresh air.

(Chorus)

There'll come a time we'll lose our walking feet,
And food will all be predigested so we won't have to eat,
And children will be made in test-tubes, so we won't have to wed,
And thank God by that time I will be dead.

There'll come a time, won't you be proud,
And by that time I'll be playing an unamplified harp on an eighteenth century cloud.

Malvina Reynolds songbook(s) in which the music to this song appears:
---- Little Boxes and Other Handmade Songs
---- The Malvina Reynolds Songbook
---- There's Music in the Air: Songs for the Middle-Young

Other place(s) where the music to this song appears:
---- Peter Blood-Patterson: Rise Up Singing: The Group-Singing Song Book [lyrics & guitar chords only] (Bethlehem, PA: Sing Out Corp., 1988), p. 38
---- Jim Morse and Nancy Mathews: The Sierra Club Survival Songbook (San Francisco and New York: The Sierra Club, 1971)
---- Sing Out!, Volume 36(3) (1991-92), pp. 52-53

Malvina Reynolds recording(s) on which this song is performed:
---- Malvina Reynolds
---- Malvina Reynolds (2007)
---- listen to youtube.com video