Shall I be outcast again this night?

Sullen gusts shriek amongst spiked sedge.
Sheep-bitten, mans’ last stand
They fear to stray on the mist-hedged,
Crag-ridged, dusky moorland.
A woman goes on, through glowering evening.
Wrapped in worry, lone, lost.
Impelled into relinquishing
Humanity, an outcast.

Her fellows reject and insult her.
Body strives, soul free at last
Returning home to nature, a mother
Tenderer than a mocking class.
Wraith already, hunched as a jackdaw,
Face fey pale against the shade.
She seeks the place for the final rite,
To melt into the moor, to fade.

Craggy clouds mushroom on a hill.
She stumbles on, life nagging.
Amongst moss-blacked rock seeks a hollow, still.
Finds only pools shivering
Beneath the wind’s banshee keen.
There is no sanctuary
On the heath. No end to be seen.
It merges with dusky sky.

A light. Fallen star. It breaks the spell.
Kindled, she wades forward.
Thoughts shadow like clouds that swell.
Halted, she sinks earthward.
Not like a tremulous grouse to nest
But the rocks that frozen lay
Transfixed in peaceful rest.
Heath shrouds her flowering skulls, grey.

She looks towards the sky in prayer.
It answers with lancing rain,
Startling her dying instinct to bear
Life’s burden once again.
Like others she must go on, struggling.
Heavily, she rises upright,
Hair whipping over her eyes, goading
Onwards towards the light.