Poverty Parish

Thinly against the sky the chimney smoke

Smudges the cloud above the stunted oak.

A starveling crow lifts his derisive croak.

The flinty fields that yielded seething thorn

Labor obscurely and are travail-torn:

Bramble root wrestles with root of corn.

The trees are black of brow in their decay.

Stiffly they lean, or cower and survey

The shameful earth like felons at doomsday.

A pack that hunts abroad with Hunger scours

Desolate meadows. Brutish want deflowers

The maids of all their beauty, overpowers

The straightest shoulders, warps them into guile.

Twisted and lean, like sheep-hooks by a stile,

The old are learned in lies and schooled in wile.

A god of scarecrows and of blight and tare

Delves and tills the dusty churchyard where

His Majesty of Death must walk threadbare.