Where do stories come from?
It was a time of Kings and Queens
And Kingdoms won and lost
The time when tales and legends
Formed and grew out of darkwoods
A monk and student once
A friar and half walked out their
Pilgrim way
Walking through life
Every step a prayer each day
Deep in Kingswood far
From law of god or man
They happened on a rude
And humble home in dark woods
A foresters, crudely made with
Mud and pelts to seal the weather out.
This peasant home would in
Generations yet to come be told
As fairylike enchanted
Yet it wasn’t.
Beyond the house still
Deeper in the wood
Less than two shouts distant
There he lay.
Snow white his face
And beads like glass his eyes
As a porcelain dolls’
Would be in ages yet to come
Dwarfish his shrunken form
And wild his pained unsmiling grimace
Stiff, cold, hard
Though the snow that saw him out
Was only recent shortly gone
A broken limb, an agony of crawling
A blanket of cold prevented him
From reaching his pelt wrapped
Wooden harbour where
He might have lived
If only for a while.
The monk and student gave God
Thanks to be alive
And with Paters and Aves
Interred the forester,
Returning to his roots where
His spirit might one day
Rise upstanding as a tree.
The tale as oft retold even when
The monk had passed and ceased
His walk, to sit content in that
Monastic Otherworld
Then by student retold and grew
And told and grew again
Confused and half recalled
With only a word or two remembered right
Something of Snow White
A dwarfish forester or suchlike
And a rudely fashioned or enchanted house
In a fairy wood somewhere
Martin Swords
Wicklow Writers
April 2014
