The Way Through The Woods

They shut the road through the woods,

Seventy years ago.

Weather and rain have undone it again,

And now you would never know

There was once a path through the woods,

Before they planted the trees.

It is underneath the coppice and heath,

And the thin anemones

Yet, if you enter the woods

Of a summer evening late,

When the night-air cools on the trout-ring’d pools

Where the otter whistles his mate

They fear not men in the woods

Because they see so few.

You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet

And the swish of a skirt in the dew

Steadily cantering through

The misty solitudes,

As though they perfectly knew

The old lost road through the woods

But there is no road through the woods.