HIDE MENU »
MENU »

The Long Tomorrow – by Percy W Kirkland

March 17, 2018

This poem is too good not to publish – an appreciation for the beauty of our natural world, which sadly may remain unseen by many – until it is gone.

From John Kirkland….

“Reading through a number of poems that my father wrote some years ago, I came across one that he wrote after we had been chatting about climate warming, the echoes from which are more potent today than they have ever been  – apart that is from the needless destruction of wild life in general from the callous slaughter of elephants to the slaughter of wildlife in general through  indifference or mindless stupidity. You might consider it worth reading to your wide audience. I feel it is, in simple verse, a fearful portent for a world that is spinning out of control and would strike a chord with many people.”

Percy W Kirkland

“My father was a country bank manager with a deep love of Shropshire and the Clee hills where he and my mother lived and where from their garden he could hear the spell-binding call of the curlew. Living with my wife and I in Anglesey his great joy as he was losing his sight was to walk with me through the sand dunes along the Menai Straits and again hear the call of the curlew which he could no longer see – one of many wonderful sights and sounds that are now disappearing from the countryside.”

The Long Tomorrow

Will one day returning Summer
Call the wild rose but in vain?
Will there be no lilac blossom
And no lilac scented rain?
Will no bud on withered branches
Answer to the Spring again,
And, where primroses have perished
Stilled forever be the wren?

Will the days of fading Winter
Leave to melt untrodden snow;
Spring released the rivers wander
Where no longer footsteps go?
Will despondent winds, uncertain,
Roam amongst the ghosts of trees
Crying for the sound of voices
On the Summer-coming breeze?

Will the longer days bewildered
Find no swallows in the air,
And the shortening days, inquiring,
See no swifts departing there?
Will the roisterers of Autumn
Search for leaves in empty skies,
Ignorant that life has vanished
From a world where nothing dies?

Percy W. Kirkland