(The) Widow of Raven Cliff

When the sea winds blow and the air shivers cold

There’s a woman walks the wild salt air

Her eyes are full of fire, stare silent at the stars

While the wind whips and lifts her horse-black hair (and it’s…)

Bring me the flowers of moonlight, she wails

Bring me the milk of the stars

Bring me the child swelled a thousand sails

Bring me the wreck on the shore

When the sea rears and roars, dark waves like horses

Charge at the black cliff stone

She steps from her shack onto Raven Cliff’s back

Slices like a knife through the wind alone (and it’s…)

Bring me the diamonds of old sailors’ bones

Bring me the grins of their skulls

Bring me the silk of the green seaweed crowns

Bring me the beached rotten hulls

Well they talk in the town of how many men drowned

How that tossed her life dead-black

Now she walks on the cliff, troubled as the wind

That no net of song can bring a dead man back (and it’s…)

Bring me the harbour of little girls’ dreams

Bring me the mist of the bay

Bring me the voice that beckons men out to sea

Bring me those lost on the way

Now I’ve no tales, empty as slack sails

Only truth fills my song

And I’ve seen what I’ve seen, and I sing what I’ve seen

This of the night before they found her gone

It was a sin-black night, waves running wild as fright

And drumming with a song that she sings

When sure as I’m here, she just disappeared

Like a lantern’s flame blown out in the wind (still I heard…)

Bring me the use of the gull’s dip and rise

Bring me the flash of the fin

Bring me the sweat of the rocks on the sand

Bring me my man back again (and it’s…)

Bring me the truth of the gull’s wailing cry

Bring me the flesh of the wind

Bring me the echoing cries of the damned

Bring me my man back again

1980

The Green Album