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What If This Road

—Sheenagh Pugh

What if this road, that has held no surprises
these many years, decided not to go
home after all; what if it could turn
left or right with no more ado
than a kite-tail? What if its tarry skin
were like a long, supple bolt of cloth,
that is shaken and rolled out, and takes
a new shape from the contours beneath?
And if it chose to lay itself down
in a new way; around a blind corner

A Pict Song
by Rudyard Kipling

(‘The Winged Hats’ — Puck of Pook’s Hill)

Rome never looks where she treads.
Always her heavy hooves fall
On our stomachs, our hearts or our heads;
And Rome never heeds when we bawl.
Her sentries pass on—that is all,
And we gather behind them in hordes,
And plot to reconquer the Wall,
With only our tongues for our swords.

We are the Little Folk—we!

All the Pretty Horses

Hush-by. Don’t you cry
Go to sleep a little baby
When you wake you shall find
All the pretty little horses

Blacks and bays, dapples and greys
Coach and six a little horses
When you wake you shall find
All the pretty little horses

Hush-by. Don’t you cry
Go to sleep a little baby
When you wake you shall find
All the pretty little horses

Anonymous

‘Get me poets as managers. Poets are our original systems thinkers. They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.’

Sidney Harman
Founder of Harman Industries