Dancing Dust
	Poems by Mollie Caird (1922-2000)
	Beleaguered badger
Home Alphabetic index of poems Thematic index of poems Biography Gallery Contact and links	Creep out, badger, bright-striped snout And brindled back, from your sandy sett, Wade through the shade of the twilit wood Where the tireless dunnock jangles yet, And the chiff-chaff’s sweet monotony Re-echoes late from tree to tree. But hark, badger, on deepening dark Drifts garish noise of the village hop Two stiles and a mile down the bosky hill, An advancing dance that will not stop Till the shrinking forests of our land Are flat beneath macadam’s hand. Beware, badger, or do you care In your narrow, snuffy, donnish head That men with a pen who loved you well, Grahame and Lewis and White are dead, And Wild Wood, Narnia, Gramarye Depend on such poor clods as we? Oxford Times, 26 June 1964 The Dancing Dust and other poems, 1983