Kit wright biography 1944 steelbook

The Best Poem Of Kit Wright

The Roller in the Woods

Who would imagine a cricket ground
Had ever existed here,
Folded into a farm on the downland pasture,
Lapping the edge of the oakwood
And the buttercup-quilted rides?
For the Toll is returned to plough
After a century of combat,
Sown to a sea of blue-green waves
Beneath which it lies drowned.
And now,
Stick nor stone of the old pavilion,
Hook nor slat of the scoreboard left:
Never an echo of tumbling children,
Tattle of Edwardians,
Knocking their pipes out on the rough deal benches.

Foaming hawthorn and rhododendron
Have colonised the field-edge, spreading
Through copper beech and flowering chestnut
And adventitious saplings.
Where
Is the camaraderie
Of the side I played for so often here:

Their thunderous blows and heroical overs,
The days that flowed with sun and wind:
Stalemates in dismal drizzle,
And the finger of death uplifted in the dusk?

Where,
I might ask,
Are Nobby and Dave and the Colonel and Phil,