Making Hay

 Are you going to ret and scutch?

Are you going to build and bind?

Are you going beat them?

And will you flatten the threads of the flaxen kind?

Do you need an old thermometer?

To break the bridge of the old geometer.

Who is measuring his toes.

While the grass grows

Under his feet - it's a vomiter

 

Have you sawn the hill in two?

Have you toed the line?

Have you sown the seeds two by two

Crossing country with the country wine?

 

Is it a stain in your pocket?

Is it a thread of your cloak?

Will it pull south if you dead head it?

Who is getting your goat?

 

Oh, the pheasant beaters know it

Yes, they howl, and they grown

When the pheasants they show it

Bear their bleating breast like a crone

 

And ringing through the trees

Goes the shotguns report

Staggering to my knees

I clutch and I moan at the sport

 

And yes, I retch 

when I see the flak in the vetch

And I feel a pea through my sleep

Though my bed is six mattresses deep

 

So, will you ret it, for one more year?

For one more time

Will you scutch and bleed, and tear at the reed?

Will you beat it? Can you ever beat time?

 

But the hands that rock the cradle

are the hands that hold the plough

And some like Cain's on Abel's

Were blood stained after breaking a vow

 

And the lines on the palm of the peasant

Are like the streaks in feathers of a pheasant

They are red and brown, and deep and proud

Like his furrowed brow, under sleeping clouds

 

And what will we make with the flax fibres

Roll them and mat them in to webbed spiders

That cling and they brook their tenuous hooks

And settle in new arrangements their atoms

 

And lattices and matrices 

That mother nature's intricacies

Have patterned

And pat them like patter-cakes, break them and flatten

Them down

Like tortoise shells hunkered

Like the dense pellets of owls

The egg yolks that bind the albumin

In the year's photo albums

And the favourite jokes of friendship

That sadden when they've gone

Oh, make the ties that bind

As strong