Rosemary Dobson - Ghost Town: New England lyrics

The gra** is bleached by summer sun The dry pods rustle underfoot, On quartz-bright rocks the lichens creep Like frail anemones betrayed Still trembling towards an unknown sea. Up the steep shoulder of the hill The wind goes scattering seeds of light. Here at the edge the mind goes on, The eyes go on, though steps must stop At plunging scarps where dizzily The plumes of haze shroud and unshroud Knife-edge and scree; and down and down Still sight must drop, be cut and grazed, To find at last the dry creek-bed. This is no landscape for the eye Cupped by a hand to shield the mind From earth's most naked cruelty. Who looks the longest must take on The fierceness of the eagle-hawk, His hungry thought, his still intent, His burnished, undeflected eye. How fared they then who built and lived Beneath the shoulder of the hill, Who planted with their hopeful hands The oak, the fruit, the sheltering hedge, The store, the church, the bakery Where still the letters are discerned That here for man is meal, his bread. The houses lean against the wind, Their eyes are scarfed with sheets of tin, I heard in all that stillness once The cracked complaining of the bell. A door that shut on nothing scraped, And with a turning, sick unease I saw a child's discarded shoe. Was it on such a summer's day They gathered from the bakery, The store, the church, and, beckoned on By the compulsion of the fall, Plunged to those knife-edged silences? His mind, as mine, will veer away Who lacks the hawks' unwavering eye.