'Hernysadharc' & 'Enfield, 1978': Two Poems by Molly Eyre

HERNYSADHARC

“…makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain

In a most hideous and dreadful manner.

You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know

The superstitious idle-headed eld

Receiv'd, and did deliver to our age,

This tale of Herne the Hunter for a truth.”

— William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor

There’s no way of knowing the low

and the keen of the mice in the dark.

The fantasy high and the night come close

& cloaked in stars.

The drawing drag of the wind in the door

and the clouds that screech and crumble

the man-high moonlight in the rain-thick hedge;

the rope still tied to the post.

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ENFIELD, 1978

the pitted postwar bombsite

was filled in at long last

there are so many many terraces

over the elegiac Constable fields

no more country churches,

no more battlements

no more sumps and cellars

no more servants’ stairs

but nothing, not even the pebbledash

will keep out what decides to come in

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Molly Eyre (no relation to Jane) is a UK based poet with a fondness for friendship, fun, and alliteration.