What Price The Lewesdon Hill?

what price the Lewesdon Hill?

what speed the Stour, Frome and Piddle roar?

too far from Golden Cap!

my Purbeck Stone in tender hands

drifting with the summers wind through Blackmore Vale.

 

how quickly comes and goes

these seasons of the heart.

the spells of stones on limescale

the wells of a Dorset eye

where once I breathed with the ghost of Hardy's pen.

 

now sixty years and counting still

the love lines of my wrist

not deep enough to sing a sad farewell

nor high enough to reach a stairwells chime.

 

an orphan to a child

from Jesus to a hand

aged wings now caged inside the darkness of this plague!

 

a ballad for a dying man

punching through the windows of my ears.

in Kings Wood,

where once I shared my carpet with the Yellow Kidney Vetch

sketched an arrow pointing south to Bucknowle Farm,

saw far beyond Old Harrys Rocks,

kissed Kimmeridge on a Dancing Ledge

and watched The Purbeck Marble shed it's skin.

 

how quickly flows my sorrow through my jumbled mind.

how silently my coarse veins weep and fail

as now,

 

 with the Sheeps Bit in my Bindweed sea

an orphan to a child

from Jesus to a hand

young hands for the closing of my eyes

Tilly Whim caves for the safekeeping of my heart;