Farewell

Chapter 21: GLOUCESTERSHIRE FROM THE TRAIN

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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.

GLOUCESTERSHIRE FROM THE TRAIN

The golden fields wheel round—

Their spokes, green hedges;

And at the galloping sound

Of the train, from watery sedges

Arise familiar birds.

Pools brown, and blue, and green,

Criss-crossed with shadows,

Flash by, and in between

Gloucestershire meadows

Lie speckled red with herds.

A little flying farm,

With humped grey back

Against the rays that warm

To gold a last-year stack,

Like a friendly cat appears;

And so through gloom and gleam

Continues dwindling,

While in my heart a dream

Of home awakes to kindling

Fire, and falling tears.