Lands

Flock around borders of a beck
steeply sipping the small taste they drip,
farm smolders on the ground as a fleck,
and none with wool without a rip.
neck stiff some will still loudly bleat,
others, mute to a sharp slope retreat.

Relentless as once flowed the stream wide,
before nocturnal yaps and howls,
before split hooves charged at a guide
that the moon probed with her dark scowls
many nights in that untamed breeze,
above wails which yet whisper trees.

An elder said it was the plague,
his grim servant said it was our lot,
though each murmuring of his maid
could not furnish from their thoughts a blot.
such was this lump of land left to wilt,
lands courtly ancestors for us had built.

The wind ripples a puddle end of day;
beheld some on their hearts fondle the house
and what is to be of man thereon lay,
fixed in the bosom of each mad louse,
who willingly in those trails stook his neck
and to an ocean his ship took to wreck.