Their love was warm and bright 

Shining forth from virescent eyes

Wrapped within their strength of passion,

 

They held each other close

Muscular solid arms entwined her

His demure lass of fashion

 

Courting, walking out, blinded by love 

Oblivious to others within their view,

Unintentional disregard, no dispassion

 

A calendar date for their union settled

First warm blossomed day of spring

When the new year recovers from Ashen

 

Blissfully together in love

Securely cabined within the woods

Their love-making unrationed

 

Marriage consummated, adolescent-like love,

Their love bears fruit of either gender

Joyful parental occasion

 

This loving family played gently.

Lives entwined, becoming one from four

They were Love’s standing ovation

 

It transfixed this family

Ecstatic to be in their world

No action by others could unfasten

 

But tragedy struck their merriment

On the bank by the fast-flowing river

The children, to their deaths, hastened.

 

Both parents did everything to save them

But they lost them in the spray and foam

There was no air in this aeration

 

Distraught parents fired by sorrow

Inner hatred blackened their eyes

Blaming each other for this causation

 

Jenny threw herself into the waters

Searching, but she too found death

Her life and love in cessation

 

Desolate, he retreated deep into the forest

No longer recognisable or accessible to others

Living forever in self damnation

 

He seeks only his own sorrow

Camouflaged within the verdant undergrowth

He has succumbed to ferned enation

 

If you’re foolish to venture unprepared.

Into the darkness of the forest, take heed,

The green man wails in utter frustration

 

Travel deeper within those sacred woods

And that wind-like moaning you hear

Is the Green Man’s groans from flagellation

 

Elsewhere, the gods' spare death

Jenny lives now in the nether world

In her watery suspension

 

Prone and still on the river’s bed

Jenny Greenteeth awaits the unwary child

Enticing and beguiling by seduction

 

She wants playmates for her twins

She needs friends for her little ones

Alluring those to a watery abduction

 

Jenny’s beauty had dissolved

Now camouflaged with river-green skin,

Long hair, and Pike-like dentition

 

Hiding stealthfully below a carpet,

Of little green-eyed duckweed

She awaits her next deathly absorption

 

The Green Man and Jenny Greenteeth

Live on, in the shadows and the shallows,

Thriving on our fears and superstitions.