Espédaillac - portrait of a French village

The church stands helpless above the village,

its bell switched to silent since midnight,

the count-down to eternity on hold.

Second homers, holiday sleepers and atheists:

les Rosbifs have bought up Le Lot in numbers.

 

Arrive by night and darkness has dispelled

centuries of pain like an analgesic; subsistence

wound up like coal-mines and cotton mills;

depression and grief sobbed into walls of stone;

staying and starving or try emigration.

 

It’s a timid bell that comes on again at six;

the quietness turns over and goes back to sleep

though the summer sun is shining - but it shines

to no purpose on vacant, unproductive fields;

it’s only value that grows on former farms.

 

1731 above the door of her crumbling cottage,

a couple of ragged fields and an empty barn:

the old woman had lived on, remembered

the last flock of sheep; husband broken, faces

of children, those who grew and sailed away.

 

A small pair of leather boots, at least

a century old, are curling in the heat, displayed

by their new owners on the barn window sill.

How quaint, some guest will remark;

another will try to picture the wearer:

  

a girl hauling water daily from the well, or

the old woman, perhaps, enduring from dawn

till dusk, stumbling and sticking it out:

one of the world’s unremembered dead,

who has quietly left something to show.

Reviews

[Terpsichore]

Such a shame, the new sweeping away the old; giving scant regard to tradition and real values.

Some will vacuously remark 'how quaint' others will see with different eyes; but either way, the wearer is gone.

Enjoyed this immensely. T

[Gerald Parker]

Thanks for your comment, Terps. I've resubmitted this laid out as a poem, its original form. G