You May Glimpse Wings... Poem by David Lewis Paget

He took to the skies most every night
Unfurling his wings of black, not white,
Invisible in the night sky when
He hovered above the world of men.

‘Go out and bring me a virgin girl, '
His master bade from his darkling world,
But scanning this broad humanity
There wasn't a virgin he could see.

He'd scan and swoop from his greater height
When the clouds got into his way at night,
And beam on in to the female kind,
To enter their thoughts, and read each mind.

Then every day he'd return back home
Reporting back where his master roamed,
‘There isn't a one, ' he said, ‘You're sure?
You surely can find me one that's pure.'

‘I scan three hundred and more each night,
And none of their thoughts are pearly white,
For even the ones not quite undone
Have dreams that tell them it might be fun.'

‘I have to say that they sometimes shock
With dirtier minds than the weathercock,
A virgin body is easy to find,
But not one pure with a virgin mind.'

He still flies out in the midnight world
In a fruitless search for a virgin girl,
Pure in body and pure in mind,
But now extinct in our humankind.

He tells his master his search is cursed,
There's none to find in the universe,
His darkling master is left confused,
‘Perhaps you would like one barely used? '

But no, his master will still insist,
And waits in vain for his virgin tryst,
So that's why, under a harvest moon,
You may glimpse wings in the month of June.

5 December 2017