Kernow Song

This is the land of another language

beneath its paper thin English skin.

Green sward on the headland's heath,

a statement thrust into the Celtic Sea

as abiding as the names bequeathed.

A cauldron where all comers arrived uninvited

a thousand years and more,

yet in the woods and knowing nooks

the contours claim an otherness.

Preachers in the hollow in the round,

Methodist fervour broke from the Church,

and before this the land of miracle plays

in a medieval tongue, performed to tell

of saints and the world's beginning.

Land that held Christ in the palm 

of sacred ground for centuries

before Wesley came to preach.

Now, despite all, it persists,

a mute mystery of some purpose in the

low lying mistlands between settlements,

in the owl light whisper hours,

when both tourists and townsfolk

from Scilly to Saltash have closed

their unseeing eyes.