Farewell

Chapter 23: JEALOUSY

Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

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.

JEALOUSY

On Zunday marn dro’ varmer’s wheat

I zeed the print and track o’ veet:

If I’d a had a rook-gun then

They vaur veet would’n a walked again.

Two on ’em—they o’ the larger zize—

I coulden praperly reckernize.

Two wer the purty-printed veet

O’ Molly—zo valse as she be sweet.

I hadn’t no bird-gun: zo it fell

As I maun laugh—ho, ho!—and tell

Here in a pub at the end o’ the street

O’ the winding—ha! ha!—o’ they vaur veet.

But may the zoul o’ him as wore

They hob-nails roast vor evermore;

And the veet wi’ the instep’s purty curve

May both on ’em get what um deserve!