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
