A Country Rhapsody

One day I walked in a country lane;

the morning opening all around me.
I smelt the garlic of wild ramson plants;
I saw the primroses growing in the hedge.

Fox cubs played in the shadow of an oak
that grew close, in a nearby field.
The vixen's rank smell, assailed my nostrils
from the spot where she watched over them.

A small spring, gurgled and splashed as it
fed a rivulet: which ran along the path side;
teasing and swaying at the frog's spawn
tacked to the watercress which grew in bunches.

Birds drank at the shallow pools and bathed
in the waters at the edges; minnows
coasted up and down looking for food,
a stray midge larva, or a water flea perhaps.

In the hedge bank, rabbits had burrowed;
and the baby ones, for the first time, crept out
only to hurry back in fright, at the noise
of my booted feet as I went past.

This demi-paradise was not to last;
the lure of money raised its head.
Desirable residences to be built
so let us pipe the spring, culvert the rivulet.

We'll bulldoze out the bank, and fell the oak.
The narrow lane becomes a road;
my country paradise is gone, and now
the lane, is just another road in town.

Ben Grader 2002

One written in the early days of retirement