Tunnel LoveA Poem by David Lewis PagetThey said that he lived in the tunnel That burrowed right into the hill, That once saw a belching funnel Of sulphur and black clouds spill, The train on the iron railway That chuffed its way into the past, To just leave the eerie tunnel, Smoke blackened and silent at last. In closing the barbed wire entrance To keep all the children at bay, They’d come to the end, in repentance, The end of the steam railway, It lived in the lost generations In memories lost to the young, In dreams and in steam in the stations The old locomotives lived on. But something lived deep in the tunnel That hadn’t been there long before, A product of sulphur and brimstone, A thing with a terrible roar, It wandered at night in the meadows, It tore the throats out of the sheep, And left pools of blood by the hedgerows, Returned to the tunnel, to sleep. The town held a council of elders The ones who remembered the train, ‘We have to get rid of the monster, It comes out again and again,’ ‘I think that the monster is lonely,’ Said one of them, in a remark, ‘He needs to be soothed to be healthy, We’ll lure him out into the Park.’ They thought of the spinster called Mary, A woman not gifted with looks, In truth she was ugly and hairy, She buried her head in her books, ‘She’d do very well for a monster,’ They all of them seemed to agree, And rolled her in lashings of sulphur And brimstone for her pedigree. They tied her just outside the entrance Attached to barbed wire in the fence, The tunnel grew dark as an ulcer, Both she and the townsfolk were tense, The monster came out and he saw her And made sniffing sounds in the dark, And Mary had gone in the morning, Back into the tunnel, not Park. And now, when the roar of the monster Is heard, there’s no gutting of sheep, But merely a purr like a hamster, That says he is going to sleep, As a man needs the love of his woman So a monster has needs to be quelled, And it seems ugly Mary is happy To be with the monster from Hell. David Lewis Paget
© 2016 David Lewis PagetReviews
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9 Reviews Added on September 19, 2016 Last Updated on September 19, 2016 Tags: sulphur, monster, locomotives, ugly Author
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