Three Edens

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This poem recounts and compares the paradise of three generations, father, sons and gradsons and is a recollection of early years spent on a farm in Kent in the 1950's compared and contrasted with today's childhood comforts, yet far from the innocent freedom of my own experience.

It stands alone four square, white-washed straw-thatched, 
small window panes, black frames, and out back chickens hatched, 
pecking weedy ground around a single willow.
Set just a little back from single country lane, 
high-hedged between the farms with tracks for bumpy tractor rides, 
strong arms to try and guide wobble wheels on hardened sun-dry ruts, 
to draw trailored dung across winter's dark and muddy fields. 
 
Father's fingers, numb with frost by hand-picked sprouts, 
with dawn's dim light not yet bright enough to warm his back. 
And hundred weights of summer grain on neck and shoulder, 
staggered through barn doors to store, to tip hessian sacks piled high, 
sack upon sack.

My mother, crushed and bruised at milking stall, 
squeezing squirting teats to fill the milking pale, 
to complete them all before mucking out the dung and straw, 
then moving on to something more which bends the back 
and rubs sodden foot sore in chilled hoof-trodden boot.

This was no Eden's garden which followed war enough to harden 
even softer souls.
Yet, it was a paradise for smaller feet to roam free among the fields, 
not caring when to make for home and sup on sprouts that dad had picked 
and mum had peeled, and soft cooked, with such hard labour, 
all overlooked by youth, and by youth's youthful ignorance. 

For some, certainly for dad, and for mum, 
Eden's garden gave way to thistle and to thorn, 
and to sweated furrowed brows serving children's carefree days, 
and precious hopes for first and second son. 

These rode upon the carts and crossed the dykes in leaky barrels 
and threw their stones at tethered bull not caring for the weather, 
whether fine, or whether dull, or whether small gloved fingers numbed with chill.

For them that Eden's garden was a Paradise still, 
and though choking staining seed was sown, it was not yet grown, 
and eyes not yet exposed to serpent's smaller gardens, 
composed for ever younger eyes, for the tainting and enslaving of ever younger lives.

That wiley snake now lurks and lies inside dark orchards of delight, 
a world explored unseen from pillowed comfort, 
and sometimes in the darker night with a different sky blue light, 
that Eden web now known world wide, that Eden made with fallen pride, 
that Eden oft obscene, that Eden all of lies, that lies behind the pixel screen.

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