National Poetry Day - Chrisswell

To celebrate National Poetry Day, we are publishing poems all day across the different blogs.

Chrisswell is located between Greenock and Inverkip, on "the IBM road", following a curse from the Prophet Peden, it has played host to a number of spectres, including these two traditionally doomed lovers...

Chrisswell

(being several verses detailing the untimely demise of a young couple and the subsequent haunting of their homestead)

Beyond the path, before the trees

Cresswell’s blessed spring

A silence all round broken stones

And the birds don’t stop to sing.

A foolish lord of Cresswell Grange

An angry prophet cross’d

He cursed the land, and cursed the well

And cursed the souls since lost.

A youth sits pale and trembling,

Weeping echoes round the stone,

He stole her and her heart away

But now is empty and alone.

Her father had rejected him,

Too young, too weak to wed,

So wind behind them skies to guide them

The two young lovers fled.

They cross’d the river and she must

Have frowned upon their love,

She clawed their boat beneath the waves

Howled skies down from above.

They sank into the wretched dark,

Death’s damp dank hand took hold,

But he would not let his lady die

And he dragg’d her through the cold.

Ashore. At last ashore and now

His lady cough’d and woke

And they struggl’d through the sand and dusk

And neither spectre spoke.

He hurried her into the house

Beside Christ’s hallowed well

She stepped across the threshold

Cried out once and then she fell.

His lover lay down dead

And he would ever be alone

Doomed to solitude entombed

Behind decaying stone.

The cries of all the cursed

Will echo down the years

All lost and yet still wandering

By the holy well of tears.

Two lovers wander silently

Amid the rubble strewn

And celebrate perpetual love

That time may never ruin.