Times of Yore

And in the aftermath
The whole world quaked
The little birds in the trees sang
Their big world beat
And shoes began their tapping
Down old familiar streets
While the new world was made
In the skipping heart beats

And each place that I had known
Came from some place beneath
The blood extracted from a stone
The thoughts of my belief

I thought that I had known
Just what you were about
But I had read too many books
To be without any doubt

My head was filled with big ideas
And things that I called facts
Just truths that had really been blown
Into God given laws or acts

And in actual fact the tombe
Was written in four acts
One of dancing bees alone
The second of marshaled cats
The third a screaming cacophony
Of Unbridled acts of joy
The fourth like some regret that's known
Only to little boys

And I stood in wonder of all that came to pass
The single voice in a woodland
Calling from the grass
A fallen tree in splender of its dying root
The fire of a birth right won fast
By fierce pursuit

And each were but an emblem of what I could enjoy
When I looked out from castle Eden
At the world He had destroyed

There were no sepulcred temples
Nor thrones of Kings long dead
There were no fire of barren towns
That called for John the Baptist's head

Only the rolling ocean
That answered but for itself
The carol of those lost at sea
Those far from home or health

I wished them on the journey
And sent them Godspeed
The briars and the tourneys
Twisting like the weed
One a rose of wisdom
The other a love sewn seed
Both fell onto fallow ground
Full of envy or of greed

And when they came to harvest
Nothing much of crop was reaped
But for the heads of corn
Whose ears were deaf
And whose eyes did bleed

I searched for the shepherd
Who could rescue the lost sheep
But he told me, friend
I cannot save those who do not bleat

So I called for the lamb
Who was lost and far from heat
And the warmth of the caravan
When the road has worn its feet

I waited in the small hours
Between midnight and the dawn
And soon came the fledgling lamb
Too tired now worldly shorn

We clipped its hooves
And sheered its wool
And once again it joined its flock
One more black sheep to join the herd
One more soul bound to the rock