The Shadow of Elspeth Brown
The sky was grey on that fateful day,
The sun was going down,
I made my way through a field of hay
To the cottage of Elspeth Brown.
She lived alone by the forest there
And studied her ancient tomes,
Her Grimoires, Necronomicons,
And her hearth was filled with bones!
I'd loved the girl for a year or two
And I'd made my interest known,
She was torn, she said, by the spells in her head,
She needed to be alone.
I knew she was seeing another guy
He called when I wasn't around,
‘He's more like the shade of a ghost, ' she said,
‘I raised him, out of the ground! '
She looked distraught as she waved me in,
Her hair was a tangled mess,
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poem by David Lewis Paget
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Czechmate!
'I won't be back 'til very late, '
The note from her had read,
He poured himself another drink
And headed off to bed,
She often spent the night away
Carousing with 'the girls',
The forty-something's group of them
Out on their monthly whirls.
They'd known each other all their lives
From kindergarten on,
Had played with beads and Barbi dolls,
With lipstick on the lawn,
They'd had the odd pyjama nights
Had ogled all the males,
And giggled through their early teens
At love, and lovers tales.
And now they'd all been married off
For twenty years or more,
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poem by David Lewis Paget
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One Mad Summer...
On the shores of Lake Geneva
Stood a carriage, black, japanned,
Bearing symbols of the lineage
Of the owner's ancient lands,
To the Villa Deodati
He had fled, without his books,
To avoid the literati
And their disapproving looks.
From a humble, fraught beginning
And a mother he despised
He'd succeeded to the title
When his wicked Uncle died,
And he'd scribbled in his youth a tract
That caught the public eye,
Full of rant and young bravura
That had made the women sigh.
But an overnight sensation hadn't
Helped defeat his gloom,
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poem by David Lewis Paget
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The Girl in the Mirror
I was staying in the village
That was known as Banzhushan,
In the mountains, in the Province
That the Chinese call Hunan,
It was perched atop the mountain
You could reach, and touch the sky,
But there were no single women,
And the men up there were shy.
They were poor, could offer nothing
To entice a willing bride,
They earned little from their labours,
And their houses, poor inside,
So the girls would leave to travel
Down the mountain to the plain,
Where they'd find a richer husband
Than the farmer, sowing grain.
So the men would send out raiders
To the outskirts of the towns,
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poem by David Lewis Paget
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Journey to Paradise
She was a queen of the old Levant,
Of a country, lost in shame,
Each page, blood-drenched of its history
Was burnt, to bury its name,
The King had gone on the last Crusade
With his knights to the Holy Land,
But locked her into a chastity belt
Forged by a blacksmith's hand.
But Queen Fatima, known as ‘The Bitch'
Was a testy-tempered whore,
She raged and ranted at everyone
And chafed at the chains she bore,
She sent in search of the blacksmith to
Disable the King's device,
But word came back that the man was hung
So he'd never work it twice.
The King was away for three long years,
Fatima's tongue was a lash,
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poem by David Lewis Paget
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Hellfire & Reuben Rose
A hundred and thirty years has passed
Since Reuben strode our turf,
A Hell-fire Methodist Preacher
Cursing souls with every breath,
He claimed an exclusive license, sanctioned
By our gracious Lord,
To dispense both sulphur and brimstone
To the sinners of the world.
At Moonta, in the mining days,
When copper ruled as king,
A fluctuation in the price
Soon ruined everything.
Families left in droves; for jobs
Were harder then to find,
The congregations withered,
They were the few that stayed behind.
There wasn't enough to pay the fund
To keep their minister,
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poem by David Lewis Paget
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House of Dreams
The house was ready to move right in
When Jane and John were wed,
A wall in the lounge was a TV screen
And another, over their bed,
It was fitted with every gadget
That could open, close or sing,
‘We want it to be the most modern house, '
Said Jane, ‘with everything! '
The washing machine was silent as
It whisked around their clothes,
They ate right out of the dishwasher,
Why stack them, keep it closed,
The carpets muffled their every step
They had a luxurious pile,
‘It's just like walking on clouds, ' said John,
As they wandered round for a while.
The lights were hidden in ceilings
Casting a faint, enchanted glow,
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poem by David Lewis Paget
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No Man's Land
I'd been cleaning out the attic
And the gables in the roof,
Which were dusty, full of cobwebs
And a horror, tell the truth,
There were boxes, wooden chests
And mouldy papers overall,
'Til the ceiling couldn't take it,
It was bowed, about to fall.
So we shunted all this detritus
Until it filled the space
We had cleared on the landing
To gain access to the place,
'What on earth are we to do with it? '
My wife said in despair,
'We'll have to burn the lot, ' I said,
'Except that old box chair.'
I remembered the old box chair
From my Grandad's, Arthur Oates,
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poem by David Lewis Paget
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The Bundaleer Throne
We live out at Bundaleer in
A cabin, in the bush,
Where the air is so much cleaner,
And there's little need to rush,
We have pigs and sheep and chickens,
And we pick our vegies fresh,
So it caused a stir of interest
When we heard of Uncle's death!
Now the 'Uncle' was my mother's
So he wasn't close to us,
And in fact we'd never met him,
Just heard tales of 'Uncle Gus',
He'd been in the 4th Light Horse
At Beersheba, so they said,
In that last great charge of cavalry
That stained the desert red.
'He became a touch eccentric
After that, ' my mother sighed,
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poem by David Lewis Paget
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The Reckoning
My mother was carried to heaven
On the day that I turned six,
She died of tuberculosis
Spitting blood in a coughing fit,
She'd been so ill for a long long time
That I couldn't recall her smile,
My father, he just grumbled, said:
'Your Ma will be gone for a while.'
'She's gone to sing in a choir up there,
Who knows how long she will be? '
But I saw the coffin that carried her out,
The hearse and the burial tree,
I watched as it sank down into the ground
And my father just left it there,
Went off to visit my 'aunt', he said,
A woman with long, blond hair.
I stayed at home, such a lonely child,
And went to a place in my head,
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poem by David Lewis Paget
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