Goat In A Hay Field Poem by Paul Reed

The wind ruffled stubbled hay
The morning passed its cheery way
When, through the hedge, a sound occurred
The bleat of a goat without it's herd;

As I tried to gain a closer view
The bleating got more insistent, the noise level grew
And through a tiny gap, just as I feared
I spied the fringes of a goaty beard;

Now the untrained ear may have struggled
To decipher the message through the hedge thus smuggled
But it seemed quite clear to me what he was relaying
‘Help! ' he seemed to be repeatedly saying;

I tried to ease his sense of fear
I cried ‘Don't worry, I am here'
But his sense of human language was not as strong
As my reading of his and what was wrong;

He looked at me as if I was daft
And if goats could do so, he would have laughed
To see such an earnest and concerned human face
Trying to communicate with the goaty race;

I knew that his place was not amongst the cut hay
That adorned the golden field that day
But in the luscious green pasture that stood next door
And over the fence he must have jumped before;

So I found the keeper of the animal paddocks
I don't know his surname, let's call him Maddox
And told him about the errant goat
Who was bleating such an urgent note;

‘Not that little blighter again,
He should learn to stay in his pen! '
And off he marched, in somewhat truculent mode
To retrieve our ‘Billy' from his mistaken abode;

Now I never saw him restored to field correct
Because I was only there for a short while, you may detect
To sample the breezy Yorkshire dales
And perhaps a glass or two of it's hearty ales;

So i waved farewell to my goat with the bleat
Who had laid his problem at my feet
And, satisfied, knowing I had helped the little ‘blighter'
To a future perhaps just a tiny shade brighter.