The Woolgatherer
I heard the phrase “woolgathering” used in reference to my daughter’s daydreaming and when I looked it up I found a definition which included “absent-minded, in a vacant daze”. I thought it was a lovely phrase so I worked it into a tune. I’ve heard many accounts from local farmers about muck spreading going wrong on West Somerset farms.
I am a young mother, a mother of two, for I courted a farm hand my father knew. He was tall and trim, as fit as an ox, but he wasn’t the sharpest of tools in the box.
Woolgathering, woolgathering all of the day, woolgathering, an absent mind in a vacant daze.
Our first born, a maiden so pure and so fair, was a beauty beyond any other compare. She was brave, creative, her heart it was true. She took her looks from her father... her mind from him too.
I sent my dear daughter to find her old man with a pie for his lunch and a flask in her hand. She’d walk through the fields with a grunt and a moan, with the flask in her bag and her head in her phone.
Now on idle pastures her father before her went spreading the fields with his finest manure. The sweetest of robins as red as a rose took his mind from his job and his eyes off the rows.
The two did collide with the such beauty and grace that the muck became one with the lines on her face. She fell to the floor all bewildered did sit from her toes to her fingers all covered in dirt.
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