Little Eliza she cries in her cradle,
Benjamin crawls on the rug by the hearth;
Hannah stirs soup with an old pewter ladle,
Jane’s picking blackberries down by the garth.

Mary and Lizzie attend to their baking,
Billy’s a carter out learning his trade;
wee Tommy follows - a man in the making -
gathering horse-dung with bucket and *****.

Widowed at forty with eight children living,
Mary, their mother, cleans houses by day;
money is short and the work unforgiving,
asking for strength, on a Sunday she’ll pray.

Thomas, her husband, was killed at the sawmill,
working long hours to put shoes on their feet;
times they were hard, nothing ever came easy,
but sweet was the love shared in old Sugar Street.

Behind locked doors the Gamblers dare
to cast our fates without a care.
The white, the black, they pull our strings
and use us as a child’s playthings.

Upon the tables of the gods
with wagers cast at any odds,
they stand us all in serried rows
and knock us down like dominoes

As thunder rolls and blind men feast,
the Red Horse rides out in the east
Who’ll win the game, who’ll take the bet?
The wheel is turning faster yet!

Deserted by the fleeting glacier
that once bore him here,
a boulder stands eroding
above a windswept valley.

Tibetan ventriloquists pose
beneath a silken awning,
whilst poor forgotten Mithras
looks on in bewilderment.

An author relentlessly writes
his soporific life’s work,
fingers smudged with
yesterday’s dead beetle ink.

Peasants fish for eels
beside a feotid canal,
as an Inca death mask grins
through flaking lapis lazuli lips.

An asthmatic mongrel twitches
and dreams of happier days,
lungs rustling like
some ghostly crinoline.

And further on an Abbott gives
his holy-roller blessing
to men in chain-mail,
four-wheel-drive caparisoned for war.

Shrivelled blossom falls
from dark green hedgerows
shaken by a foreign wind.
Dust flurries whirl and eddy,
dancing, spinning along
bone-dry lanes that lead to nowhere.

Across a beige, hay-scattered paddock
wide-eyed horses shake their heads,
and skitter from fence to fence.
In the distance a young girl
shouts unintelligibly to an unseen friend,
light livid on her white t-shirt.

“Hot day,” comments a passing old man,
“Enough blue up there
to tailor the Royal Navy.”
Under his arm a folded newspaper
screams silent headlines of drought
in some foreign land.

And within me a long-dormant memory awakes,
for this is not how things should be.
I hear innocent warnings sing
down the empty, echoing centuries;
“For Summer is i-cumen in,
and Winter is a-gone . . .”

Warm sun gives its blessing
to rolling blue-black cloud-band.
Sudden wind blows coldly
across the greening meadow.
Tall young grass bends helpless
before its unknown master.
White tailed rabbit runs now
for bramble-burrowed refuge.
Knowing magpie chatters
up high within tall oak tree.
Mare and foal seek shelter
beneath the may-thorn hedgerow.
Butterfly flits wildly
towards safe dry-stone walling.
Heavy now the teardrops
of saddened springtime weeping.
Rain pours like a torrent
down ancient foot-worn pathway.

Yet like a swallow flying,
so soon the squall it passes!

Sunlight glints like jewels
on dripping rain-bowed flowers.
Blackbird sings to blackbird
from branches decked with diamonds.
Steam arises gently.
from muddied flanks of cattle.
Furtive feet bestir now
to seek the heat of noontide.

By green and windblown rippled slopes
where cattle graze in summer sun;
beneath blue skies where larks sing shrill
and rabbits by the hedgerows run.
When meadowsweet and columbine
bedeck the grass like ocean foam;
we soft return like shadows lost
to seek our old ancestral home.

Within the tree-lined borderlands
we wait until the day is done;
‘til passing fancies leave us be
and once again our time is come.
When doors and gates are closed and locked
we slip within as night winds roam;
and talk in whispered secrecy
of times in our ancestral home.

No more within cold fireplace
do fallen logs burn bright and fair;
from panelled walls in sullen oils
dark portraits of the long dead stare.
On bowing shelves of oak repose
the toils of men in leathern tome;
unread and lost for centuries,
hid deep in our ancestral home.

And through the watches of the night
we drift from room to balcony;
recalling days of childhood lost,
and laughter of sweet memory.
Yet all too soon we must be gone
‘ere birds again chorale the dawn;
and disappear like shadows soft
that fly from our ancestral home.

As I was out a-riding over pleasant hills of green,
beneath a sky of cornflower blue where larks sang all serene,
I heard a distant hoof beat drumming loudly ‘cross the land,
and I saw a horseman riding with a bow strung in his hand.

Upon a steed as white as snow he galloped like the wind,
and carried awful knowledge of how oft mankind has sinned.
Upon his head he wore a crown that dazzled like the sun,
and he aimed a headless arrow for to conquer and have done.

Behind him came another on a horse of fiery red;
a mighty sword he wielded as along his way he sped.
I shouted “Where is it you ride, and what’s that great blade for?”
He laughed and answered, “Always, friend, I take the road to War!”

And as I watched him vanish in the blue horizon’s haze,
a black horse trotted by me with its rider’s eyes ablaze.
He carried rusted iron scales that never more would weigh,
and he named the price of famine that Humanity must pay.

The day grew bleak as winter and the green hills turned to grey.
As birds fell dying from the sky, I turned and rode away.
My own horse snorted madly, and his steaming breath did writhe,
as I spurred his pale flanks onward, and again I swung my scythe.