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Farewell

Chapter 10: THE HOLLOW LAND
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About This Book

A varied collection of poems and short prose pieces that celebrate the Cotswold and Gloucestershire countryside while exploring love, longing, and spiritual yearning. The poems range from concise nature lyrics—observing rivers, hedges, birds, and seasonal light—to sonnets and free-verse meditations that ask for vision, joy, and fellowship. Several pieces foreground homesickness and the solace of ritual and local customs, others offer wry or reflective commentary on mortality, vanity, and daily life. Prose poems and songs intersperse formal verse, producing a sequence that alternates celebratory rural description, quiet grief, religious petition, and gentle humour.

THE HOLLOW LAND

Elms on the marbled sky
Walling this hollow land,
Write something black that I
Find hard to understand.
Belshazzar in his hall,
Belshazzar and those lords
Saw suddenly on the wall
Great crooked words:
A doom, a doom of fear ...
Something our hearts forget
Is mighty still and near
To claim his debt.
Behold before it falls—
Behold the mighty hand
Of Nature on the walls
Of the hollow land!