The Border Ballads

Hear, these women singing the pure thread of pain,

woven through the landscape where there was no grace

but dread and drama, a silver dreaming silvering the land

like a deadly river never kind to mankind.

Close eyes, imagine beyond their steel tongues,

sword hands and men deceitful by day

but made mirk brave by two-faced moonlight.

These men, these women there,

dwellers in debatable lands, an unmapped state

between nations, never wholly Scots or English,

mistrusted reivers, hated by kings.

For centuries the teller women sang,

remembering blood, more than loss.

Their songs like wire in no man's land

through the taut ligaments of this place.

She sings now of an armoured man

brought down and left for corbie's food,

neither hero nor fool in his end,

indifferent death by the thousand fold,

watched by blood loving Cheviot heights.

Before even this border was drawn, 

this was the land the Brigantes hardly tamed,

which was barely won by the veneer

of Saxon tongues.

As she intones, the silver moon becomes

a war-worn helmet hammered flat 

as a counterfeit coin,

or else a sickle ready for those 

transgressors of five thousand raids.

Monks' chants beyond the Pennines,

curses chanted in the dales and fells,

the stark oath engines of countless years,

hard bitten generations grown only

high enough to face death unflinchingly.