Hardy's Travelling Bird
Flitting across the waves and shallow straits,
With ecstasy she glides in graceful flight,
From lands afar, from royal kingdoms borne
High mystery beyond the common sight.
Heaven’s feathered basket of beak and bone,
Thy size shall never match thy wisdom sought
By restless souls forbidden yet to know
And break the crest of animated thought. [1969]
Adam’s Brow
Today, my Lord, the moon hangs high above,
And grey cloud smothers hoar the furrowed down
Where peels the farmer late with carefree love
To ply his thick-hide hand and scatter ground.
Lord of bleak, barren fields the scarecrow lurks,
Whistling wastes the wind and breaks aloft
The burly thistled leaves and brushes soft
To strangle, strafe and gouge the farmer’s work.
Warped sickles, shovels, picks and bogwood scythes
To heave and harvest before blind snowdrifts drive,
Alone, one hand rotates till night to free
The fallow fields fret-crossed with straggle-weed.
Fragments of field-dead soldiers churn’d and chopp’d
By the blades of the plough a second death,
They serve to seed in rank an autumn crop,
Ignored unseen a harmless shibboleth.
The potted path is trod, now seas of rain
Sluice slabs of mud and by the clocktower face
Bespatter him, the hero will remain
Apart from Life’s mad rat-infested race.
The aching chores have ceased, the charcoal flue
Burns through the night, the barn owl cries anew,
Perhaps the fallen fields will yield their due,
One hand moulds the landscape’s unhurried hue. [1982]
Down on the Ones
Here lies the dust of time spent cast
In forms of regulated lives,
Moulded by the mass have past
The ones the mass could not drive,
Rich law courts play – the poor are tried –
If wrong hands hold the gambling dice
Then history will ever lie,
Shields and spears can’st ne’er entice
The free to end their search in vain,
Reward the patient ones with gold,
When dying echoes Life’s refrain
We may one day know or be told.
Here lies the dust of some waif’s dream
They turn their own to mix with strife,
Plagued with sorrow will ever seem
They cannot win the game of Life. [1981]