'The Earth
Prayer' was the title that Samuel J Looker gave to this poem in Jefferies' hand. Looker published it in the Chronicles of the Hedges in 1948 along with the comment that it 'is obviously part of the feeling that inspired the writing of The Story of My Heart' (i.e. the opening passage).
N.B. Jefferies writes beautiful poetic prose. Forgive his clumsy attempts at poetry.
Imaginative water colour of Liddington Hill by Jane Muir FCSD
The sunshine in the cloudless sky,
When up the hill I pressed on high,
Upon the earth I laid my breast,
The thyme beneath my form was prest,
My face within the grass was laid,
My hair was mixed with the green blade;
I smelt the odour of the grass,
And the sweet smell the sweet earth has;
The little insects trembling fled,
And turned aside from couched head,
The wind now uttered siss, siss, siss,
Sharp as the sound of a bee I wis,
The wind that blew so free and blithe,
Like the clean swinging of a scythe,
The wind that lifted every stalk,
As if the grass would rise and walk;
Nor could these grasses be so small
But that I knew them one and all;
That earth might keep my lust so bold,
I with my finger touched the mould,
The atoms clung to the moisty skin,
And as a prism my nail glowed then,
But as earth's beauty I adored,
I heard my heart against the sward,
Within my soul from a distant sea,
A deeper pulse that answered me.
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