Pulling Petals
A story of a great life growing up among the hills.
Children playing together, only knowing simple thrills.
Never thinking how they lived in any type of bliss.
Life moves along so quick, no time to reminisce.
Winters spent playing on hillsides of fresh snow.
That parents taught them how to sleigh on years ago.
Together building the snowmen in their gardens outside.
Topping them up each day as gradually they died.
In the village that had the same rhythm every day.
In old pubs where workers would sing the nights away.
Where people would stay when they’d grown up on the land.
All slowly move away, cause it’s all out of their hands.
The childhood couple that did everything together
Imagining dramas, promising to stay there forever.
The little girl’d take him round her country farm.
The boy holding her hand, protecting her from harm.
She’d stop him in a field, pull a daisy from the ground.
Look over her shoulder see that no-one is around.
Stare at him seriously, question him on the spot.
And Pulling petals ask: ‘I love you, I love you not.”
The village boys had a whole football field to play.
In summer months staying up to 9 o’clock each day.
Walking home along the old countryside veins.
Along ancient river banks, down the Roman lanes.
Parents took turns driving them into town school.
Kids inventing their own games, making up their rules.
Thinking they could stay forever in this old place.
Like their knowing parents, greet every familiar face.
Thought they’d grow up and work, now there’s no village anymore.
Just a beautiful retirement home for pensioners to explore.
A beautiful paradise to grow old and die in.
And the Former kids move out to keep on surviving.
In the village that had the same rhythm every day.
In old pubs where workers would sing the nights away.
Where people would stay when they’d grown up on the land.
All slowly move away, cause it’s all out of their hands.
The girl grew up fully, her country life is dead and buried.
Killed off the memories of that time when she married.
The years before her first smartphone would ever appear.
No more riding horseback across her old farmland every year.
Boomers all the time keep coming to buy their homes
Far away from their cities ultra low emission zones.
They don’t know their grandchildren, they don’t seem to care.
As long as they get to spend their money anywhere.
The old goal posts in the village slowly rot away.
Families there for centuries quietly move faraway.
No kids get to dance together in the big village hall
Apparently no-ones fault there are no children anymore.
The Snows didn’t come this winter, the snows don’t come at all.
Churches close one by one, newcomers convert them all.
Rainbow cities left behind, slowly dying or dead.
Time to emigrate to a new place, make new memories instead.
In the village that had the same rhythm every day.
In old pubs where workers would sing the nights away.
Where people would stay when they’d grown up on the land.
All slowly move away, cause it’s all out of their hands.
The pubs close one by one in nearly every village now.
Not enough jobs to support the people anyhow.
Finn & Finnella the folk singers buried long ago.
Along with the folk songs now nobody would know.
Last year the post office and old school shut down.
Join the old church and shop, also houses now.
Newcomers don’t like tradition, maybe it had its day.
Nine hundred years for a village is good going anyway.
Pensioners getting rich, not their fault adults’re poor.
Thirty kids twenty years ago, today it’s only four.
Buying a second home, the culmination of their plans.
Not their fault their grandchildren get to live in vans.
Who Meet up with old friends, don’t talk about the past yet.
About the childhood silently agreed on to forget.
Happiest not to return, streets emptier than before.
Don’t want to recognize the abandoned pubs there any more.
Drive past the old inns where nights were sung away.
All empty houses for now for owners on holiday.
Villages they can’t afford is what they all inherit
Giving directions to tourists dressed up like parrots.
So they keep to themselves while they ponder and reflect,
New faces ask why they haven’t met the locals yet.
Back along the country lanes they learned to drive on,
Asking themselves the question, what did I do wrong.