A Strange Courting Poem by David Lewis Paget

I never knew where she got the bones
But she spread them out in the grate,
And said to me that the way they fell
Would tell her about my fate.
I’d gone to her for the Tarot Cards,
I’d been told that she was a wiz,
But didn’t know what a wizard was
Till I met this girl called Liz.

She wasn’t a witch, she said to me,
For witches were too mundane,
They only had spells and love potions
And most of them were insane.
But she could look into the future with
The bones of the been and gone,
They helped to focus her visions on
The land of the to and from.

She spoke in riddles and teased my mind
In a language I didn’t know,
I asked her what I was headed for,
She said I had far to go.
She told me about my love, Christine,
And the secret plans she bore,
She wasn’t, as I had thought, pristine,
But had men in tow, by the score.

I asked her about the wedding that
We’d planned for along the track,
She said, I’d never be happy then,
Better get married in black.
She scattered the bones for a second time
And they fell about in the grate,
‘If you go on with your plans, ’ she said,
‘You’re in for a dismal fate.’

‘There’s blood, ’ she said, ‘and a kitchen knife,
A terrible slashing and cries,
‘I don’t know when, but it’s after then,
And a crazy look in your eyes.
Then someone lies on the kitchen floor
In a horrible pool of blood,
And footprints there, and a tipped up chair
Where somebody walked in mud.’

The wedding went as we’d always planned,
I never gave it a thought,
And Christine put on my wedding band
She didn’t think she’d be caught.
A man came round to the house one day
To say that Christine was his,
I took good note of his muddy boots
And suddenly thought of Liz.

He came at me with a kitchen knife
And said that he’d set her free,
I’d thought the knife had been meant for her,
But no, it was meant for me.
I seized his arm and we struggled then
While Christine stood in the door,
I somehow managed to turn the knife
And he lay dead on the floor.

‘Why did you set him loose on me, ’
I cried, ‘the son of a gun,
What was the vow you made to me
That I’d be the only one.’
But Christine cried, and she knelt by him,
Her lover, down on the floor,
‘I told him before he shouldn’t come,
But he said that he loved me more.’

I was acquitted for self-defence
When the case came up for court,
And later I found that Christine went
She wasn’t the loyal sort.
I went again to the Oracle
And I spilled the bones with Liz,
While she laid on me a gentle kiss
And said, ‘It’s what it is! ’

9 June 2015