Farewell

Chapter 31: SAFETY

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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.

SAFETY

You are like a pool reflecting shadowy trees

Of green and glint of sunbeams mixed together

(And I had forgotten both) in water clear.

Full of the foulness of blood and lust and fear

Is the past now. I break its holding tether,

And stand once more with guiding Innocences.

You are like silence in which I can be myself.

You are the truth of music: something lost

Ages and ages ago, and forgotten, and found.

Ere death my feet are set upon holy ground,

I, wanderer amid a wandering host,

Come home, led by the magic of one sweet elf.