With billhook keen and a leather glove
He weaves the hawthorn through the hedge's blood
Bend like the willow back to the earth
His fingers trace where the green gives birth
The blackbird scolds from a woven throne
As he plats the living to standing stone
For every gap that his hands repair
The wind unwinds what was never there
Oh bind it tight,
bind it true The hedger's art and the morning dew
The fiddle hums where the brambles twine
A song as old as the landlord's line
Sing old man through the thorn and rain
Some borders grow where we state our pain
He walked the lane with a peddler's pack
Left a snail's shell where the hazel's cracked
Her laughter stung like the nettle's kiss
A fleeting balm for his callous bliss
Now the accordion wheezes that wandering
tune As he works the ditch by the waning moon
The hedge remembers what men forget How
boundaries bloom where two hearts met
Oh bind it tight,
bind it true The hedger's art
and the morning dew
The fiddle hums where the brambles twine A song as old
as the landlord's line
Sing old man through the thorn and rain
Some borders grow where we state our pain
The crow steals wool for his stolen nest
The rich man's fence wears an iron crest
But the hedger knows in his aching bones
True walls are made of the living groan
Oh the Mayflower blooms where the poor man pleads
And the black thorn writes all the deeds we need
Now
his billhook rusts where the elder grows
The hedge stands thick where his memory goes
The blackbird's young fill her woven dome
With songs of the hands that once shaped their
home
Deep in the ditch where the wildflowers
graze The land still
sings what he couldn't say