In The arbour under bough

A silence fell, quite still.

The breeze was cooling gently

Our blazing want of will

A Robin followed swift of wing

Dancing light before our feet,

While all around her Sisters sing

Great Hymns of Nature, Incomplete

Words seemed to float away from us

While painted in that place,

For all the reverence spoke of love

Not one could frame your face

And often times I’m taken there

When from my mind you’ve flown,

To save myself from dark despair

For there, I feel I’m home.

 

What is harder than to realize we are wrong?

Standing before Altars, beneath Spires

 

Are we then without pause to blindly carry on?

Or to extinguish the constructs and causes of The Fire

 

For what are we if in our time we pass from East to West,

Circuitous by nature, unknowing beyond the bend

 

Believing earthly toil might deliver peaceful rest

To be welcomed by a moment after which, is only end.

 

In such blissful nothing would the Journey be in vain

The winding path of travel ever lost?

 

Or might those who follow never tread our way again

And with their every footstep repay themselves, our cost.

 

The Sinewed boy Glistens, Spent,

At Sports Days end, Magnificent

 

The Golden Smile, his Ruffled Crown

A Monarch Raised to be Brought Down.

 

Mothers Pride, Fathers Fears

Too Much to Hide through all The Years

 

A Trophy in a Picture Frame

A Silver Chiseled Long Lost Name.

 

Of all The Battles Fought and Won

None held its Day as that has Done.

 

The Stock sat snuggly in the shoulder,

Now here they are a lifetime older.

The greater mass filled Rifle Sights

To squeeze the trigger, felt so right.

 

Someone said they were the one’s

To fall before the blazing guns,

And so they fell, some Mothers Sons,

Some lives snuffed out and some begun.

 

Some went home in sleeping bags

Rotten flesh in haversacks,

Some The Low Road, some The High

Not one of them knowing why

 

 

Fatal Blow

Down where The Land yields to The Sea

As the edge of an offered blade,

A boundless ocean flows harnessed yet free

Through trenches millennia made.

 

At The pool of my blood I’m cut to the bone

Fractured cliffs rise up to defend,

My heart echoes through chambers forever alone

With a pulse that no steel could end

 

Love is The Sword that rusts in the tide

Thrust too deep to ever withdraw,

Like the myth of a King who drew it but once

To find himself ever at war

 

 

Rural Rides (The Bird Scarer)

Under Sack Cloth between The Cracks,

In ditches by The Workman’s Tracks,

Beyond the Bawdy Ale soaked House,

The Scarer Wakes with Field Mouse

 

The Dust of Bones that fell in France

Was scattered here to bring advance,

To farmers fields with Heavy Plough

Our Dead are churned to feed us now.

 

A Bastard Boy no Mother Mourns,

The Blasted Cannon of Empires Dawn,

His Clapper Claps to scare the Birds

Each Clattered Beat Drowns out his Words.

 

Across these Patchwork Jaded Hills

An echo gently whispers still,

Of all the voices never heard

Drowned out by time to scare a bird.