HOMEWARD

I happened to catch a glimpse of a tree lit-gold through frosted glass today. The sun painted that tree like fire as the leaves fell across the car park.

It was an impressionist moment: the clear,  bright, blue sky, the shimmering, translucent leaves, diffused through the window. I was struck by how beautiful, how silent, how natural it was. Each leaf, falling individually, tumbling in the breeze, distinct, yet diffuse.

Last night at the barn dance gig, my friend Tom sang a song in honour of it being remembrance, and the hundredth anniversary of the end of the Great War. Tom likes a folk song, and as he put it, he always feels ‘short changed’ at a dance with no song.

Well. What he sang to make up for that, was actually terrific and I thought I’d find the words. It’s a poem by a lady called Cecily Fox Smith, who I think had quite the way with words, writing as she did in the villages of Hampshire. She herself captures something quite golden about the falling leaves through the frosted glass.

Homeward

Cecily Fox Smith

Overseas in Flanders, the sun was dropping low,

With tramp and creak and jingle, I heard the gun teams go,

When something seemed to set me, a-dreaming as I lay

Of my own Hampshire village at the quiet end of day

Home, lads, home, all among the corn and clover

Home, lads, home, when the working day is over,

For there’s rest for horse and man when the longest day is done

And they’ll all go home together at the setting of the sun.

Brown thatch with garden blooming with lily and with rose

And the Meon running past them so quiet where it flows

Wide fields of oats and barley, and the elder flowers like foam

And the sky all gold with sunset, and the horses going home.

Oh Captain, Boxer, Traveller, I see them all so plain

With tasselled ear-caps nodding all along the leafy lane

And somewhere a bird is calling, and there’s swallows flying low

And the lads are sitting sideways and singing as they go.

Home, lads, home, all among the corn and clover

Home, lads, home, when the working day is over,

For there’s rest for horse and man when the longest day is done

And they’ll all go home together at the setting of the sun.

Well gone is many a lad now, and many a horse gone too,

Of all the lads and horses from those old fields I knew,

For Dick fell at Givenchy and Prince beside the guns

On that red road of glory, a mile or two from Mons.

Dead lads and shadowy horses, I see them all the same,

I see them and I know them and I call them each by name,

Riding down from Swanmore, when all the west’s aglow

And the lads all sitting sideways and singing as they go

Home, lads, home, all among the corn and clover

Home, lads, home, when the working day is over,

For there’s rest for horse and man when the longest day is done

And they’ll all go home together at the setting of the sun.