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MODERN VILLAGE

A news item last summer about the fuss in a village over the cows that fouled the road every time they passed prompts the following:
With apologies once again to Grey!

The tractor homeward speeds its noisy way.
The electric lights are switched on one by one.
The television holds its nightly sway.
The cows from milking parlours are all gone.

Still fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
But the air no more a solemn stillness holds,
For small transistors greet the coming night
Where courting couples hide in distant wolds.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew trees’ shade,
The petrol pumps are standing in a row.
There’s a trousered girl dispensing lemonade
And some long-haired youngsters singing go-man-go.

Behind those chintzy curtains, oh so sweet!
The Major lives where the labourer reared his brood,
Complaining of the cows out in the street
Which were so very, very, very rude.

Up in the churchyard, now no longer neat,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet turn.
How can they lie when in the village street
The ton-up boys do have their nightly ‘burn’?

In the early hours of incense breathing morn
The cows returned from pastures of the night,
Driven from a tractor with a blaring horn,
They left their marks for everybodys’ sight.

Commuters driving o’er it in a flash,
Think that there is something very, very wrong,
But it’s only where the cows have made a splash
That they get a very, very nasty pong!

Now the moral of this story seems to me,
That the people from the towns should surely stay
In the place where they were born, not come to the country
Where the cows have always had the right of way!