Her wheel still turns by the cottage door
Where the wool remembers the moorland roar
Fingers nimble as the wind through rye
Twist the fleece into a golden sigh
The firelight dances on the cobweb balloon
Weaving shadows in the flickering gloom But the merchant's cloth,
so smooth and cheap
Has stolen the songs that the spindles keep
Oh,
spin it fine,
spin it slow Let the wheel hum what the heart still knows
The fiddle sighs with the spinner's art
A tune as old as the hill's own heart
Singing old mother through the twilight spread
Some threads still hold when the rest are
dead
He brought her silk from a foreign land
Left a silver coin in her outstretched hand
No one wants wool when the world moves
fast The past is a weight you cannot grasp
Now the accordion
wheezes as the factory's groan As she cards the last fleece she'll
ever own The wheel still turns though the market's
cold Her hands weave stories the cloth won't hone
Oh,
spin it fine,
spin it slow Let the wheel hum what the heart still knows
The fiddle sighs with the spinner's art
A tune as old as the hill's own heart
Singing old mother through the twilight spread
Some threads still hold when the rest are dead
Oh,
the young girls stare at the mill's new
dress Bright as a penny and half the stress
But their fingers itch for the lanolin's grace
And the touch of wool on a grandmother's face
Oh, the wheel may stop and the loom goes still
But the sheep still walk on the wind-bent hill
Now her wheel sits silent, the wool all spun
The fire burns low where the work was done
But deep in the folds of a shepherd's coat
Her spinning lives in the thread she wrote
And when the north wind sings soft and
low It tells the tale of the spinner's woe