The flowers grew from the craters where
The bombs ripped open the ground,
Back in that terrible time of war
When God in his heavens frowned,
I just remember destruction, piles
Of bricks where houses had stood,
And years along, new growth began
Where Airmen lay in the wood.

Their plane came down in the poplar trees
That had stood in a long, straight line,
Tearing a swathe of destruction through
Where we’d played in a former time,
And just beyond was the surgeon’s house
That had boasted a Roman Spa,
Now flat, and exposing the Roman Tiles
That survived the previous war.

I’d go down there with Priscilla, who
Lived out by the railway track,
We’d play our games in the cellars
That had lain open, since the attack.
I hadn’t taken much notice of
The flowers that grew in the weeds,
That sprang into life like mushrooms, when
The bombs had scattered their seeds.

Priscilla did, she would smell the scent
That had wafted up from the flowers,
And say, ‘I’ve never seen these before,
They’re new, they’re meant to be ours.’
She’d pick the flowers and take them home
And attempt to make them thrive,
But once removed from their sacred ground
They’d rarely stay alive.

I didn’t handle the flowers as much
So I wasn’t quite as ill,
When she went down with a jaundice that
The doctors couldn’t heal.
They tried their best and they traced it to
The flowers she’d taken home,
A level of radioactivity
Was the reason that they’d grown.

The ground has been cordoned off for good
With a special yellow tape,
While she and I are forbidden to go
To the place that was our escape.
They keep her tied to a wheelchair where
They attempt to hide her sores,
While I’m in a sort of cage since I
Grew skin like the dinosaurs.

David Lewis Paget

Their shadows should have stepped side by side
As once they had done before,
But nobody noticed that one had gone
From the boardwalk trace on the floor,
They still paraded, down by the beach
At the height of the afternoon,
And friends would swear he was still in reach
Though she wore an air of gloom.

Nobody actually spoke to them
So it must have been hard to tell,
Which of the couple was really there
And which fallen under a spell,
The law of shadows is crystal clear
If you’re there, a shadow is cast,
The sun shines through if it isn’t you
For that’s its primary task.

It happens I knew the guy quite well
And he had shadow to spare,
While she was much more ephemeral,
Was somebody not quite there.
I wondered what had attracted him
For she gave out a spray of gloom,
There wasn’t that gay affinity
That could gladly light up a room.

I watched as his life force faded away,
His shadow to disappear,
I told him he needed to leave that day
Or the end of his world was near.
But she reached out, and shooed me away,
Seized hold of his wavering hand,
Her eyes burned bright with an evil light,
While his were blank and bland.

I know that we never conversed again
I’d see him afar by day,
She clung on tight to his fading light
As she marched him around the bay,
He hadn’t a shadow left to throw
When at last he died on the beach,
Condemned by her to a living hell
As his life slipped out of reach.

He was laid to rest at St. Mary’s Cross
While I waited for her to pass,
To see if the shadow she stole from him
Would still cleave to her, at last.
But sunbeams shone through her mourning veil
There was only mine could save,
While I made sure as I stepped one back
That she’d die by my brother’s grave.

David Lewis Paget

I’d seen the widow walk back and forth
The length of the village street,
Her veil so black and her dress so long
You’d see neither face nor feet,
She never would speak to anyone
But would simply seem to glide
Within the folds of that mourning dress
Like a slowly ebbing tide.

At first she’d walk at the early dawn
But then she’d be gone by noon,
The light of day would spirit away
Her wandering sense of gloom,
She’d not be seen till the sun went down
When you’d hear the swish of lace,
Catching along the sea wall stone
And whipping around her face.

She never would miss the evening tide
That would bring the fleet back in,
Check every boat that was still afloat
If its catch was full, or thin,
Her only love had gone out one day
With his sails set high to roam,
His boat had floated out in the bay
But he had not come home.

It took a week for the widows weeds
To start to march on the shore,
And no-one dared to look in her face
So deep was the grief she wore,
‘I never knew pain like this exists,’
She’d cry, when she was alone,
But over the next few painful weeks
She knew that he’d not be home.

Then she slowly tore off the widow’s veil,
She gave up the mourning dress,
I watched her enter the world again
Just as beautiful, no less.
It took me months but I won her round,
I’d kept my scheme afloat,
By hiding away the tools I’d used
To sink her husband’s boat.

David Lewis Paget

The building had to be as it was
Before, when it first was built,
So the Inspector said to me,
I was mortgaged up to the hilt,
We’d already changed some minor things
They’d stand, he said, in the way,
We couldn’t move in till they were changed
Reversed, to our mute dismay.

He ******* the permit into his hat
And clamped it down on his head,
‘Where are we going to sleep tonight?’
‘That’s not my fault,’ he said.
He’d locked us out of our only home
With it only half rebuilt,
Then driven off as he sneered and coughed,
‘Are you trying to feed me guilt?’

We’d lodged our plans seven months before
To rebuild a nest of rooms,
The Council never got round to it
So they left us mired in gloom,
We couldn’t wait for their paperwork
So we just got on, and ‘did’,
We toiled by night in the after light,
In the day, just lay and hid.

Then when the paperwork finally came
It covered a room too short,
They charged full odds for their office clods
But for plans, their worth was nought.
Back he came on a day of shame
To demand we tear it down,
That extra room that had fed our gloom
So I said, ‘You go to town!’

I handed over a hefty pick
And I said, ‘It’s up to you.
I wouldn’t touch it myself,’ I said,
‘But you do what you must do.’
I didn’t tell him of Cranston Leigh,
The ghost of that room out there,
I should have said, but then Cranston’s dead
So the end result was fair.

He laid about him with pick and axe
And he tumbled half a wall,
Before first hearing the screech from Hell
That was Cranston’s warning call.
I saw the Inspector’s hair rise up
Like an early crop of rye,
And that was even before the ghost
Screeched out, ‘You’re gonna die!’

I’ll never forget the scene that night
The Inspector burst in flames,
While Cranston, from the unholy dead
Leapt in and out of our drains,
That room still stands, it’s unfinished still
The Inspector will not call,
We left a poster of Cranston Leigh
As a Welcome, out on the wall.

David Lewis Paget

My father called it the Watching Tree
For it turned, and swivelled to see,
He’d planted its seed in the winter weather
On top of the grave of Annabelle Feather
Who killed their mother for why, whatever,
Then hung from a hawthorn tree.

The hangman never would cut her free
While she spun and spiralled around,
Her eyes a-bulge on the village gallows
In front of the church they call All Hallows,
While urchins jeered to toast marshmallows
As Annabelle stared at the ground.

My aunts in pinafores hung on her feet
To stretch her neck with the rope,
Her tongue stuck out at least six inches
A rigid perch for the garden finches
Who pop the eyes of the one they lynches,
Once they’ve given up hope.

They laid her down in an open grave
The rope wound tight at her throat,
Planted the seeds of the tree above her
Just to remind of the murdered mother
So people be kinder to one another,
Or that’s what my father wrote.

The roots of the tree bored into the skull
Of Annabelle, in through her eyes,
Tendrils of thoughts were left forever
Deep in the well of Annabelle Feather
And sent from her eyes to the tree, whatever,
A poisoner never dies.

So still I call it the Watching Tree
For it waits till I’m not around,
Dropping its poisonous leaves whenever
It’s cold and bleak in the winter weather,
As black as the heart of Annabelle Feather
Stone cold, and dead in the ground.

David Lewis Paget

The Inn sat down in a hollow,
Deep in a grove of trees,
It sat so far from the road, the yard
Was two feet deep in leaves,
It looked to be well deserted,
Except for a single light,
That poured its glow on the porch below
Late on that fateful night.

I’d looked since I found the Grimoire
Sat up on that dusty shelf,
Written in faded longhand
I couldn’t decipher myself,
The ancient scribe in the library
Had helped to decode each line,
And said it spoke of an ancestor
With a similar name to mine.

It mentioned the Seventh Circle Inn
And where it could still be seen,
It lay astray by a country way
Deep in a copse of green,
And Agnes Drue was a name I knew
Though I heard she’d not been found,
After the Mass they held that day
On consecrated ground.

Her coven had raised a spectre
Beside the Inn, in the woods
Near to a marble altar where
An ancient church had stood,
But then it demanded a sacrifice
To give the Devil his due,
And everyone formed a circle then
Apart from my Agnes Drue.

I entered the Inn to find who kept
The Seventh Circle of sin,
I needed to find what happened to
The one who was lost within,
An ancient crone kept the bar in there
Who croaked, ‘I know why you’re here,
You’re far too late for she’s at Hell’s Gate,
Has been, for many a year.’

I thought that I’d find a clue in there
On the fate of Agnes Drue,
And asked the crone was she on her own,
Would she rather there were two?’
A screech came up from the cellar then
Like the wail of a troglodyte,
The crone went down with a worried frown,
‘She only does that at night!’

Then right in the midst of the cellar floor
Was a ******’s wooden chest,
With iron hasps and rusted clasps
And a chain wound round the rest,
I burst it open to shrieks and cries
That seemed to come from within,
And there was the corpse of Agnes Drue
Where the Devil had locked her in.

The staring eyes in her skull had gone
But they seemed to stare the same,
There was no flesh but the woman’s dress
Was torn in a rage of pain,
And held in her frightful bony hand
Was a book that she’d scribbled on,
Deep in the dark of her awful tomb,
‘I knew! One day you’d come!’

David Lewis Paget

I’d seen her coming and going for
A couple of years or more,
Her hair in the wind was blowing
Every time she walked on the shore,
I must admit I was taken in
By her eyes and her lips of gloss,
She made me think of imagined sin
The woman who never was.

She wore the flimsiest blouses that
Were loose, and tied at the waist,
And lived in one of those houses they
Put up in the new estate.
She seemed to delight in teasing me
By wearing her skirts so high,
The slightest gust from a breeze would free
A glimpse of a naked thigh.

She never actually spoke to me
But she’d raise a brow my way,
While I hung over the garden gate
Thinking of what to say,
And soon it became a ritual
She’d pass in the early hours,
Then come again in the afternoon
With her basket full of flowers.

In time I noticed a subtle change
In the way she wore her hair,
She started to pin it back, and then
It didn’t seem so fair.
The eyes that had used to tantalise
Became harder, and the gloss
Was fading out on the ruby lips
Of the woman who never was.

I thought I was slowly losing her
But just a little each day,
Nothing would stay the same, I saw
Her slowly fading away,
I said to a friend, ‘What’s happening,
I have this sense of loss,’
And he replied she was trapped inside,
The woman who never was.

‘She doesn’t really exist you know,
It’s better you let her free,
You’ve compromised and idealised
Till she thinks, ‘I can’t be me.’
She may just show if you let her go,
If you don’t, you’ll count the loss,
She’ll stay forever inside you then
The woman who never was.’

I switched her off and I walked the shore,
Went up to the new estate,
Then held my breath and knocked at her door
And I said, ‘I know I’m late.’
She looked at me and she smiled, you see,
And she said, ‘My name is Roz,
It’s been so long I was feeling wrong
Like the woman who never was.’

David Lewis Paget