They shut the road through the woods

Seventy years ago.

 

 

Weather and rain have undone it again,

And now you would never know

 

 

There was once a road through the woods

Before they planted the trees.

 

 

It is underneath the coppice and heath,

And the thin anemones.

 

 

Only the keeper sees

That, where the ring-dove broods,

 

 

And the badgers roll at ease,

There was once a road through the woods.

 

 

Yet, if you enter the woods

Of a summer evening late,

 

 

When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools

Where the otter whistles his mate.

 

 

(They fear not men in the woods, Because they see so few)

You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,

 

 

And the swish of a skirt in the dew,

Steadily cantering through

 

 

The misty solitudes,

As though they perfectly knew

 

 

The old lost road through the woods…

But there is no road through the woods.

 

 

Portraits of my children at a lost place

to the tune of a favorite poem

for the occasion of the 50th anniversary

of my parents’ wedding.