Green Man 25th August 2008. Well, now we have been reduced to
private functions on the allotment we get much smaller numbers. All members are welcome of course, but this year just the
relief from not having to fly post the event was satisfaction. We did the usual stuff, and with say, no more than 20 people during
the day, tried out some green woodworking. There was food on the go as usual, and we pressed a small quantity of apples too. On trying out some different
methods for making arrows a colleague tempted me with the notion of setting up a little furnace and doing some blacksmithing. Once the allotment dispute is resolved
then I can begin to put such ideas in practice. At the moment storytelling and music is the way forward, and what better way then to write a new song called the Green Man.
The Green Man
I am a wolf, I am an arrow, the hunted deer, the bull of a target
The predator, the prey, the moss on an alder
My feet are wet with the travel of rain
My hair a mat of twigs and disdain
In tooth and claw I was bourn on her back
All nature produced me to widen her tract
To regain what has been lost to the men of feign
Desdcended are they from the families of Cain
I grew to the size of a colony of honeybees
And bred on the wing a sweetness for insurgency
A thousand stings to the temples of perdition
A thousand drones to the tune of sedition
You are not what you seem Old man of the gean
Your fruit is still green Like the mind that you wean
You nurture revolt Like the insatiable goat
Who’s cry is consort With a brazen throat
I chopped down the ash to embody me a handle
To wield with the fervour of a barbarous vandal
With metal I sharpened the edge to a tinker
To cut through the mire of Babylon’s bingers
The holly bore me a hand with a pang of deliverance
To curtail from the land the offending officiants
She bore me a prick with a poignant remittance
To go into humanity like a scourge unto pittance
I blew me a scream from the wood of hornbeam
To the slaughter of man upon the altar he shams
His blood feeds the soil in revenge and spoil
To replenish the earth from Mammon’s unrelenting toil
Into the darkness I ventured within a mangle
Amid the lianas where men are hung and strangled
Caught up they are in the vines of their vices
No rest for them as they struggle against reprisal
I festoon myself in the clothing of evergreen armour
Tending to the needs of the budding seedling farmers
Who march in droves from their sacred oakley groves
To trample down a succession of foreign hordes
And in that most quiet place where the yew casts its face
I bend me a bough that is strung with a vow
To cast upon the assailants of my Gallic verdant glades
A death as promiscuous as the rape of my virgin vales