Friday, August 5th, 2016

The Way Through the Woods, by Rudyard Kipling

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They shut the road through the woods

Seventy years ago.

 

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Weather and rain have undone it again,

And now you would never know

 

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There was once a road through the woods

Before they planted the trees.

 

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It is underneath the coppice and heath,

And the thin anemones.

 

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Only the keeper sees

That, where the ring-dove broods,

 

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And the badgers roll at ease,

There was once a road through the woods.

 

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Yet, if you enter the woods

Of a summer evening late,

 

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

Where the otter whistles his mate.

 

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

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

 

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And the swish of a skirt in the dew,

Steadily cantering through

 

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The misty solitudes,

As though they perfectly knew

 

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The old lost road through the woods…

But there is no road through the woods.

 

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Portraits of my children at a lost place

to the tune of a favorite poem

for the occasion of theΒ 50th anniversary

of my parents’ wedding.

 

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