Animism - Dynamism

Was it always this sad or bad?
Or is it duty denies me refuge
in the insanity of happiness?
the dances split by days
and joined by midnight,
when we, as cool as Angels
girded cities with our laughter,
to die each night in poison
wrought so lovingly from earths
and fields we loved in daylight.

Between the hop fields lie the roads of 1897,
the single tracks of memory like cilia or synapse.
The empty sky flattens all this agriculture
to its formless best, the nourishment of history,
and I feel this should have been a battle ground,
so quiet with the ages gone and wasted.
Ghosts and ancestors drink together in these towns;
they live and love the winter with their faded minds
before their judges, drunk and cold, dismayed and old,
die happy in the warm-lit bars of distance.
No Government could reach this place, no tendrils
of the Vortigen we have to charge us with insanity,
to break our minds with virtual, grey anxiety.
The world is far away from here, so lost and far,
and we speak in languages they banned so long ago,
and sing the battle hymns of revolution
though we have lost all idea of reason, meaning
and the danger they once possessed for us.
We could kill with song and sound
at distances they could not reach with any gun.
We could sing them dead each midnight
and then retire for heavy suppers in the bars
we made of silence and ungoverned land.
This is the passion we have lost,
the rhymes of nineteen-eighty-four,
so metrical and loved backwards in the woods
and ice-bound lanes of this, the last, lost county.
See us in the detail, in the maps and gods,
the obscene pagan carving on the Christian church.

This is animism living in the marches.