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Farewell

Chapter 38: “LOCAL FATALITIES ARE REPORTED”
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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.

“LOCAL FATALITIES ARE REPORTED”

Dangerously sheltered they,
The lovers lay
Upon the great dead hill,
Frail flesh and blood:
Beneath a twisted thorn,
Which to the heaven’s mood
Died and was born
Again, as lightning fell.
Two mites of trembling clay—
Ah, what cared they!
The lightning flashed:
They laughed.
The thunder crashed:
They kissed.
The grey rain lashed
The hill: and hid them in mist.
Did they return again
To the sunny plain,
To spite and scorn,
The plane of mortal care?
Nay, with passions of skies
They mingled were ...
They were made wise
Beneath the twisted thorn.