POEM *** The road through the forest, *** from Rudyard Kipling.

POEM
*** The road through the forest, ***
from Rudyard Kipling.

They closed the road that crossed the forest
seventy years ago.
The bad weather, the rain, they have erased.
And now nobody would say that once,
before the trees were rooted, even,
there was a road here, crossing the forest.
It's under the heather and anemones,
the bushes cover it;
and only the old guard
know that where the torcaces nest
and the badger is stirring, there was a way
that crossed the forest.
But if you go there
In summer, late, when the air
at night it cools in the ponds
where trout and otters swim
they call their partners without fearing men
that they have never seen,
you will hear - if you go there - a horse's trot
and rubbing a skirt on the wet leaves
breaking through
through the darkness, like
if they knew, they,
the road that crossed the forest,
now that that path no longer exists
that crossed the forest.