The cloud hung over the mountainside
Like a black and evil pall,
It took the sun from the valley, and
It held the folk in thrall,
The crops lay dormant in the fields
For they wouldn’t ripen now,
The farmers down in the valley cried,
‘It has to go, but how?’

They’d watched the cloud as it gathered
Bringing a dark and fierce storm,
With hail that battered the tender shoots
And flattened the barleycorn,
They shook their fists at the darkening sky
At this untoward attack,
But the cloud had threatened them, by and by
When the lightning answered back.

Then thunder rolled down the mountainside
And it shook their rustic homes,
It rattled the beams and the rafters, and
Was felt in their feeble bones,
They thought the wind would blow it away
But the air up there was calm,
And still it hovered there, day by day
To blanket each valley farm.

The tiny Kirk was amass with men
Who’d never been there before,
In hopes that a sudden show of faith
Would bring their god to the fore,
But the cloud still leered from the mountaintop
For weeks, and it hung there low,
‘Perhaps the answer is not with God,
But the gods of long ago!’

The older men in the village thought
The answer might lie with Baal,
And some had prayed to the thunder god
But the answer they got was hail,
‘There must be something the elders knew
To bring such things to a stop.’
‘That cloud up there is the Wandering Jew
Who never may reap a crop.’

They racked their brains for the thing to do
And one of them wasn’t nice,
‘What we need is a ****** girl
To send up a sacrifice.’
So they seized a maid called Annabelle,
Whose parents were dead and gone,
And dragged her up to the mountaintop
In hopes it would move along.

But they weren’t too sure just what to do,
Should they play a chord with a lyre,
Should they sound a note, then cut her throat
And throw her corpse on a fire?
She screamed at the top of her voice, just once
And the sun came shining through,
‘I’ve not been a ****** now, six months,
But I wouldn’t be telling you!’

David Lewis Paget