Electra Movie Camera image by Joe Haput CC BY-SA
The Dead Nest: Cantos I-IX
by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole
I
On a bluff above the lake
Was the bower, where the wake
Of pleasure craft passed below
Whose possessors seldom know
Of the simple, custom hushed,
Ways by progress not yet crushed;
So it was in this quaint place,
Though afar the engines race
Of truck, train, globe-hopping jet,
Here old manners linger yet.
II
There a verdant, viney bed,
With plush rushes for the head
And a quilt of downy green
Which of fern had knitted been
By the spirits of the grass
Those who slip through beveled glass
As through air, presented proud,
Where the goose-hen trumpets loud
Athwart the bed’s pedaled crest,
As befits a monarch’s rest.
III
Empty yet this bed remained
Though the grove with yearning strained
And the woods in rings around
Up unto the farmers’ bound
Of cultured field, and the reed
Which the marshy lines concede
Of liquid land, where submerge
The wasted tree at the verge
Of nurture’s soil—there the lake
Does its muddy cravings slake.
IV
Happy once the roads nearby,
Gravel tracks which wagons ply
As they did in days gone past,
Though turning now not so fast
Motors added, tractors new
Which the fruit to market drew
And the ripe, ground-hugging plants,
Acres which abundance grants,
But that had declined of late,
Blighted by some creeping hate.
V
Hence the spring which budded not
Though the sun its riches hot
Bestowed on all, and the creek
Woke again to waltz and freak
In its course, fat run-off fed,
But slumbered yet furzes dead
And the seed locked underneath
That should sprout and burst like teeth
Of chomping life, lay low-down
In their graves, bereft and brown.
VI
Gathered then the wizened ones,
Ancient elders, burned by suns
Of seasons spent back of plough
And guidance of sheep and cow
By a store where cross the roads,
One that rises, one corrodes
Into little as it winds
Through the wrack which chokes and binds;
This they pondered as they spit,
Squatting they in council sit.
VII
“Almost three score have I dwelt,
By these streams where run the smelt,
And the trees whose crown is moss,
Spied I never such a loss
In those years, though older yet
Are the graylocks, some here set
On their haunches, let us hear
If might be some obscure year
When the crop refused its bloom
And the water mooted doom.”
VIII
“I am three score twenty-five,
Fully, fully did we thrive
All those years, except one spell
When afar munitions fell
On the trenches, and was gassed
Our lads abroad, men harassed
Until they dropped bloody heaps;
Even now that manhood sleeps
In foreign fields not our own,
Passed those seasons spring unsown.”
IX
Thought they silent on his speech,
Did it them some recourse teach?
Lessons of an age ago,
If they could its message know.
But progress lapsed ‘til there spoke
A bookish and watchful bloke
Who often walked tracks alone,
Whom the tramping hours had shown
Secrets in the thickets hid,
Secrets which he spilled unbid.