Question

We have an annual "Scarecrow Festival" in my home town. All very twee and touristy. A poetry competition (scarecrow theme) is part of the deal and last year I entered. Didn't win. I still like my poem, though.

Sympathy for the Scarecrow

For more than two millennia
o’er the cornfields of mankind,
watched a drab and lonely guardian –
to his fate, damply resigned.
Midst ancient Grecian crops he stood,
half-deity, half-joke;
in Old Japan, omniscient,
for all he couldn’t walk.
Through Rome he passed to Europe
and thence to England’s shore,
where by many names, he kept the grains
safe from the songbird’s craw.

Thus, in Somerset the mommet
startled starlings from the field;
while the mawkin sent the woodpigeon
back to the Sussex weald;
Gallybagger on the Isle of Wight,
and Berkshire’s hodmedod,
urged the linnet and the jackdaw
to avoid the new-sown sod.
On Scottish crofts, bodach rocais
‘the old man of the rooks’,
with tattie bogle stood against
those black and clever crooks.

A strange, unlovely sentinel;
this Guy of twine and straw,
having sought a brain in Oz, in vain,
can’t tell us what he saw,
in all those fields through all those years
as harvests came and went;
the hopes and fears, the famished tears,
the laughter and content.
We’ve made of him a grotesque,
teamed with witches and the dead;
and it somehow seems scant gratitude
to one who kept us fed.

#ancient #lonely #poetry #Europe

Faithless1 7

Answer 1

Love the first and third. The second has way too many English name references, for me, to make much sense. Skipping the second, I had a very nice picture of the topic and related to the end.

Answer 2

That's great!

Answer 3

The poem is very good. I can only speculate that it was a bit too clever for your local judges to appreciate. Well their failings are not ours!

Answer 4

I could while away the hours conferrin' with the flowers consulting with the rain....(whistle or fife) and the thoughts I'd be thinkin' I could be another Lincoln if I only had a brain

Answer 5

Nice cup a tea an a slice of cake?


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