What urgent malevolence

Impressed the metalled highway

Burying the cartwheel rutted tracks

Where mummers danced and acrobats

Indulgence sellers and potion vendors

Preyed on pilgrims singing praises

Making babies, telling stories

Wending their way to Walsingham?

 

A sombre day – progress spoke,

“Fell the ancient Hangman’s Oak,

Lay concrete carpeting on

Fields of slender celandine

Uproot mandrakes, crush sweet cicely,

Oust otter lodges from their couches

Leave no squirrel in its dray

Make a way!”

 

Make a way for madcap hurtlers

Heltering-skeltering to Gadarene

Teeth-grinding auto self-destruction

Abusing, cursing random strangers

Who undermine their GT isolation.

 

There is no time for buttercup teas

Beside a gentle sunshine stream

Watching clouds and dreaming dreams

No time to ponder the bluebell dell

Where red-haired girls in lacy dresses

Wove daisy chains for necklaces

 

There’s no sign of the one-room school

Teaching tables and joined up writing

No trace of the frog–pond we fished

For newts and toads and sticklebacks

Taking them home to a certain fate

In jam or pickled onion jars

 

Who cares that the copse

Where we played cowboys

And the Indians never won

Is gone?

Supplanted by a pet food outlet

Ikea and a ‘Homebase’

In the sainted name of progress.

 

Just the ghosts of red-haired girls

Keening where bluebells used to grow

Weaving wreathes of asphodel flowers

To drape the necks of hedgerow creatures

Foxes, hares and ‘clearanced’ badgers.