I've come home from my school's summer Fayre this evening - managed to sell a dozen or so of my homemade chapbooks - folk will buy all sorts of rubbish to raise money!

I was reminded of this poem I wrote after a previous Fayre & thought I might share it with you all!

 

After the Fayre

 

Tattered bunting flutters in the breeze;

Balloons bobble limply on their strings

But milling masses only weakly wander

Idly squandering their last half hour.

 

Enervated by the tiresome trudge

From booth to booth, the hapless punters

Prowl like tired, uninterested lions

That have already hunted and fed.

 

One or two may pick at a morsel,

Price reduced, to clear a shabby stall

Whose bored stallholders stand there waiting

For permission to pack up, go home.

 

The fast-fading fete awaits its fate,

The clearing away of unsold junk

Dumped in a dustbin, skip or black bag

Or consigned to attics one more year.

 

And, as a solitary plastic bag

Drifts across the flattened, trodden grass

And the last car drives off, I hear sighs

From the field to claim it was not fair.

 

It had no choice, it remonstrates;

It wanted quiet rest beneath the gentle sun

To grow its green and ripen into grain;

It did not care for trampling, careless feet.

 

And yet it knows that it gave pleasure

For a few short hours to folk who came

And tasted summer, threw aside the world

In its green oasis in the city’s desert whirl.