SUNSET

My sun is set, i lie in shade.
As shadows thicken round my grave,
Perchance my soul has fied to Hade
For earthly sins to roast or rave.

Nor mourn nor weep for me my love
As custom counsels tears for Dead:
My fate is marked in Hea’en above
Where wrongs do char our sprites to dread.

My grossest sin was want of fruit
A man i was of slighted build-
In strength and speed i lacked the brute
Where war-like Men would bull the field

My beard would straw my chin like weeds
The which you ordered razed by day.
My chest was smooth like marbled beads
Whilst others’s choked with shocks of hay.

My frailty chaffed my manhood claims:
They issued forth in piping tones
Like reeds that croaked in fragile frames
And silenced were by children’s drones

At work i rose to Cook through ranks
And served the Army in the Mess.
Whilst Men would carve their meat with tanks,
I trussed their chickens for the dress.

Whilst bullets cracked with loud report
And men did hack their foes to shreds,
And blood would flood their fields like port,
I sliced to chips the cabbage heads.

My wage would not support your dream:
Your pot of gold i turned to tin
With clattered through your mental stream,
Begrimed and sooty through the din.

Suburbia called you ‘cross the fence;
His golden gates so arched with hints-
His gracious mansions musked with scents-
His rampant flowers spread like chintz

Instead i flung you in some hut
Where dust and flies did haunt your steps
And cowdung polish grimed your heart-
I paled in shades like manhood scraps.

And then came age that crumpled me:
it barbered me in savage cuts
That left my head s straw-blown lea-
My body shrivelled like some nuts.

With that your dream of children sank
The scorn of folks with kids your dread,
And i your mate no man but crank
Betrayed indeed the wedded bed.

The worst of all was yet to come;
As whilst some Men with moneyed psalm
And hid in fat their mongrel sins,

I was at most a bag of bones
With nothing ‘xcept for rags and you,
Some huts of straw with tattered cones,
Some goats for milk and widowed ewe.