04-12-2026, 02:00 PM
Cover me ever so quietly
with a quilt of everything England
A ginger-bread bed-spread
With every coast and Inland.
A patchwork feast of fields and shires
Boundaries and what-not-ments.
Squares of cloth with lots of plots
And patches and small allotments
Within it all those Tall Tales
Woven well together:
Green Men and grandes dames
All in an English weather.
A hunter and a runaway hare
In brilliant broad embroidery
Stitched and fixed higgledy-piggledy
Needle-neat and orderly.
Piping boys and girls and babes
Dressed in the altogether
With John Keats among the pleats
And dancing that goes on forever.
Knights on horseback, love in a haystack
All their groaning sewn in,
Grandfather clocks and Goldilocks
In the house she's all alone in.
Tea-cup spills and Welsh Hills
Cat's hairs on the borders
Cotswolds and blanket folds
Disruptions and disorders.
Little Jack Horner there in the corner
Rucked in and tucked up
While Little Bo Peep has let her sheep
Get all muddled and mucked up.
Tipsy maids in Gypsy Glades with
Garlands on a Mayday
Cats in hats with cricket bats
And crones playing croquet.
A Brueghel scene you might have seen
But never on a bed-spread:
The heroes and the heroines
From all the tales that you’ve read.
Simple Simon and the Pie Man
The Jack and the Beanstalk peddler
Who'll turn you into Puss in Boots
A prince or Cinderella.
There's a stain on the pane where Sir Gawain
Stands outside a dragon's den;
And biscuit crumbs where Humpty comes
With all the king's horses and all the king's men.
Cover me over with the quilt
Quieten what I’m discovering:
My adulthood stole my childhood
And I am still recovering.
with a quilt of everything England
A ginger-bread bed-spread
With every coast and Inland.
A patchwork feast of fields and shires
Boundaries and what-not-ments.
Squares of cloth with lots of plots
And patches and small allotments
Within it all those Tall Tales
Woven well together:
Green Men and grandes dames
All in an English weather.
A hunter and a runaway hare
In brilliant broad embroidery
Stitched and fixed higgledy-piggledy
Needle-neat and orderly.
Piping boys and girls and babes
Dressed in the altogether
With John Keats among the pleats
And dancing that goes on forever.
Knights on horseback, love in a haystack
All their groaning sewn in,
Grandfather clocks and Goldilocks
In the house she's all alone in.
Tea-cup spills and Welsh Hills
Cat's hairs on the borders
Cotswolds and blanket folds
Disruptions and disorders.
Little Jack Horner there in the corner
Rucked in and tucked up
While Little Bo Peep has let her sheep
Get all muddled and mucked up.
Tipsy maids in Gypsy Glades with
Garlands on a Mayday
Cats in hats with cricket bats
And crones playing croquet.
A Brueghel scene you might have seen
But never on a bed-spread:
The heroes and the heroines
From all the tales that you’ve read.
Simple Simon and the Pie Man
The Jack and the Beanstalk peddler
Who'll turn you into Puss in Boots
A prince or Cinderella.
There's a stain on the pane where Sir Gawain
Stands outside a dragon's den;
And biscuit crumbs where Humpty comes
With all the king's horses and all the king's men.
Cover me over with the quilt
Quieten what I’m discovering:
My adulthood stole my childhood
And I am still recovering.