Static

When it's too late, it's too late...

Stark patterns rent by winter storms

Sweep the blood-red sky,

By haunted mills and frozen rills

The static crackles by;

But not a stone stands on a stone

To halt its whispered sigh.

 

Through twisted steel and molten glass

The signal spends its force

Then mutters on through blackened wheat,

Bent on its wayward course;

But none may hear the crackling tear

That shimmers through the gorse.

 

Twice round the earth the signal runs

To seek that whip of steel,

The midnight radio of man

Has ceased to hear or feel,

And silence reigns, where once had seen

The skirling of the reel.

 

In some deep water-filling ditch

Lost in a ravaged land,

The signal finds a radio

Clutched in a dead man’s hand;

And crackles static through its leads:

‘I have returned, for man!’

 

David Lewis Paget