"gallants" poems
Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!
Rescue my Castle, before the hot day
Brightens the blue from its silvery grey,
(Chorus) “Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!”
Ride past the suburbs, asleep as you’d say;
Many’s the friend there, will listen and pray
“God’s luck to gallants that strike up the lay,
(Chorus) “Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!”
Forty miles off, like a roebuck at bay,
Flouts Castle Brancepeth the Roundheads array:
Who laughs, Good fellows ere this, by my fay,
(Chorus) “Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!”
Who? My wife Gertrude; that, honest and gay,
Laughs when you talk of surrendering, “Nay!
I’ve better counsellors; what counsel they?”
(Chorus) “Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!”
3.3k
The sky was a smudge-coloured blue up there
When the sailing ship came in,
With full top gallants and spinnaker flared
Full flight from a world of sin,
The mermaid carved on her prow was proud
As she breasted the salt-licked spray,
Her hair a-stream, as the waves she ploughed
And surged to Ascension Bay.
I’d watched her approach from the Sailor’s Rest
That lay way up on the cliff,
‘It isn’t a question of when,’ he’d said,
‘Nor even a question of if!
The ghost of ‘The Falls of Borrowdale’
Comes in with a clear blue sky,
It happens but once a year,’ he’d said
‘On the twenty-fifth of July!’
I’d laughed at him in the ‘Admiral’s Arms’
As he swallowed his seventh ale,
While others listened with frightened eyes
Each face was a shade of pale,
‘You’ll see it best from the Sailor’s Rest,
That ruin, up on the cliff,
But don’t get caught by the devil’s cohort
Swarming up from the ship.’
They’d scaled the cliff to the Sailor’s Rest,
I knew the story of old,
Had slain the crew of the ‘Captain Teck’,
Or so it was always told,
They’d left the ‘Rest’ in a sea of flames
For the sake of an ancient feud,
While ‘The Falls of Borrowdale’ lay wrecked
By the mutineers that crewed.
They’d seized young Molly, the serving girl
Who’d worked at the Sailor’s Rest,
Had pulled her hair and had pinned her down,
Exposed the girl at the breast,
They took their pleasure and dragged her out
To the edge of the cliff, and pale,
Then flung her screaming down to the deck
Of ‘The Falls of Borrowdale’.
And so it was that I lay with the glass
So firmly fixed to my eye,
Up on the cliff by the Sailor’s Rest
On the twenty-fifth of July,
The ghostly ship flew into the shore
Under a mass of sail,
No sign of the crew, no lookout stood
On watch at the forward rail.
The ship ground up on the Daley Rocks
Rose shrieking, up in the air,
Her timbers creaking and groaning with
The mermaid’s look of despair,
The crew poured out of the lower decks
And flung themselves overboard,
These phantoms, straight from the devil’s lair
To put good men to the sword.
I ran some way from the Sailor’s Rest
Lay under a bush, and hid,
I didn’t know what to do for the best
But watched, to see what they did,
They swarmed all over the Sailor’s Rest
Put everyone to the sword,
Then dragged poor Molly out on the grass
And I cried, ‘Please stop them, Lord!’
Then the phantoms stopped as they heard my cry
And they turned, each black as sin,
Molly let out a quivering sigh
And they burst in flames, within,
She stood alone at the edge of the cliff
And she waved, no longer pale,
While the mermaid smiled on the prow of the ship,
‘The Falls of Borrowdale.’
David Lewis Paget
Dec 22, 2013
Dec 22, 2013 at 12:09 AM UTC
A rude dawn over the city
Where Pepys once fought with his beautiful wife
After seducing whatever servant-girl chanced
To be around, where kings
First ruled from cold castles full of cockroaches,
Murderous cousins
Lurking through the baleful halls of history
Eyeing the empty throne. The stinking
River long shorn of fish sweeps elegantly before
The crimson petticoats of multiple ******
Promenading along Thames Street,
Winking at under-washed gallants.
Vauxhall gardens a pithy cavalcade of priests and doxies,
Of flower girls, flaxen haired girls selling fruit,
Anxious to reach home before the ****** hour of early
Evening when beaus gather in alley ways establishing
A testosterone gauntlet in the dust-spawned gloom.
The road to Tyburn is littered with lost hopes!
On hanging day bodies swung like debutantes dancing
To jazz tunes-
Aristocrats quartered with precision squealed like common folk,
Bleeding as much. The city watched all this
And didn’t murmur-never complained-
Smiled, as only a city can smile, at gin-drunk matrons, pie eating aldermen
And the ****** activity in street shadows by relieved young women on
VE day 1945.
Feb 6, 2017
Feb 6, 2017 at 6:04 PM UTC
I don’t understand how can anyone un-love someone.
Even more, claim that they never did.
I don’t understand how words can be taken back after they were said;
after they were cherished by the receiver.
I don’t understand how kind words are hardly truthful; hardly reliable; mostly deceivable.
I don’t understand how people can rob you of things
they gave and argue that it wasn’t yours.
I don’t understand how people have the gallants
to twists their words and fiddle about with them.
I don’t understand how some people can close their eyes off certain things,
refusing to accept the pain they granted.
Disregarding the effects of the slightest actions;
how significant it is to other people.
I don’t understand how they can be forgiven;
unburdened by guilt;
freed from traumas;
living life to the fullest.
While others suffer extensively from what they did.
Mar 11, 2013
Mar 11, 2013 at 8:20 AM UTC