1. |
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Banish Air from Air -
Divide Light if you dare -
They'll meet
While Cubes in a Drop
Or Pellets of Shape
Fit -
Films cannot annul
Odors return whole
Force Flame
And with a Blonde push
Over your impotence
Flits Steam.
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2. |
Starlings
03:48
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3. |
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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.
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4. |
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When the old Kings of Cumbria ruled this land
Four brothers usurped their father’s command
Each knew himself worthy, noble and just
Each hated the other, for greed and blood-lust.
They fought and died on the forest floor
Condemned as wraiths for ever more
To scream their rage to the restless night
To clash cold iron in jealous fight.
The blood-red berries, the ghostly shapes
Those fraternal four
The yews of Borrowdale stand guard
over the grassless floor
Four trees were planted, each for one
The roots sank deep among the bones
The woods once echoing with rage
Fell still, now silent for an age.
For the roots hold the bones of the brothers apart
The berries, the blood from the eldest’s heart
The leaves, the poison from the youngest’s wound
Their curse, kept close in in the cold, cold ground
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5. |
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Seventeen hours at sea, westerly bound from Rye
As we wait alone,
My lugger and me, naught but eggshells on the line
I saw her down by the quay, her dark smile turned my eye
For the night alone.
My lugger and me, naught but eggshells on the line
Dawn broke, I was trimming the sheet. Offering her no fond goodbye
As we left her alone,
My lugger and me, naught but eggshells on the line.
And now I hear her coming for me, I can hear her scream in the rise
Of the wind...
My lugger and me, naught but eggshells on the line.
The wind will howl and the ropes will crack,
and I will stand firm with the mast at my back
Get you down, I'll curse at the gale, get you down, I'll spit at the tide
And she'll drag me down low
To feast on my bones, naught but eggshells on the line.
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6. |
Neptune
04:49
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7. |
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King Storm was sat up on a dark mountain cloud,
In his arm was strength and his voice was loud;
When he spoke to the winds they rush’d to his call,
And woe to the land where its echo might fall.
At his call the dark pine bow’d his head to the ground,
And the rivers rush’d wild o’er the bright flowered mound;
When he laugh’d in his rage youth bent his form,
‘Ha ha, do you know me now?’ cried bold King Storm.
The bark, in his pride, sailed over the dark main,
Ah, when will they see Earth’s bright valleys again?
King Storm from his throne sends his voice o’er the deep,
And the doom’d fated Crew, now eternally sleep.
‘Hark, many thousands speed round my dark throne,
The ocean’s my element, his sceptre my own;
The earth struck to dust, the world bends his form
‘Ha ha I’m the master now’, cries bold King Storm.
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8. |
Showers on Ascension Day
03:51
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9. |
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There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild-plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
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10. |
Northern Lights
03:43
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11. |
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The perfect chord had already been played
Six billion years before we learned to hear.
Mercury in treble, Saturn, bass
And Earth and Venus mellow, low and clear.
Like a mote of dust in the morning sky.
The perfect concord of the spheres suspends
Their ceaseless orbiting in space and time.
So men, they say, made music to pretend
A million lifetimes in that moment’s chime.
But others say we might still hear the sun
A hundred million miles away from here
Calling back his kin as space expands;
A note too deep and slow for human ear.
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Ben Walker Brighton, UK
With his work recognised as 'deft' (Telegraph), ‘stunning’ (The Guardian) and ‘second to none’ (Verity Sharp), Ben Walker
has built a reputation among his peers for fusing tradition and innovation like no-one else.
In between producing and playing for other artists, Ben's characteristically warm, whimsical and virtuosic solo set delights folk audiences and festivals in the UK and further afield.
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