Dark were the nights when lights from towns and cities could not find me

limping through the furrowed fields, blind except the few short metres and

flashes of the daisies in the fields.

 

Lambent came the moon’s dim glow above towering hedgerows that

passed through clouds and forks in canopies of threatening trees

and made a thousand faces in the leaves.

 

And I from evening not long from thronging streets and pubs had come;

to me, mermaids’ songs lilted still back earlier on the sunset

sadly asking if beauty ever walks free.

 

Faces in the canopies that leered and morphed from abstract shapes:

gargoyle-like grotesqueries.  When gusts gaped leaves, the same they asked

of ugly; but why ask that of me?

 

Close and clinging felt the mist, as I stood frightened lost and drunk

and wracked with sadness that descends from emptied glasses’ bow lips

that fill the empty and empty the filled.

 

Now, faces of clouds’ voracious mouths devoured the moon’s dim glow,

and now no light would light the maniacs that hid and whispered talk

between cornstalks, where I now walked.

 

The madmen whispered again to me the corollary of the mermaids’ song

as I continued my walk home, along the unlit path, looking not right nor left

but over my shoulders fretfully.

 

From evening I not long from streets had come but streetlights couldn’t find me.

Now I walked through the corn and tried to hold my head up high and walk on;

ugly does walk free, ugly walks alone.