Billy’s dead and gone to glory – so has Billy’s sister Nell:
There’s a tale I know about them were I poet I would tell
Soft it comes, with perfume laden like a breath of country air
Wafted down that filthy alley bringing fragrant odours there
In that vile and filthy alley long ago one Winter’s day
Dying quick of want and fever, hapless,patient Billy lay
while beside him sat his sister, in the garret’s dismal gloom
Cheering with her gentle presence Billy’s pathway to the tomb
Many a tale of elf and fairy did she tell the dying child
Till his eyes lost half their anguish and his worn, wan features smiled
Tales herself she heard hap-hazard, caught amid the Babel roar
Lisped about by tiny gossips playing round their mother’s door
Then she felt his wasted fingers tighten feebly as she told
How beyond this dismal alley lay a land of shining gold,
Where when all the pain was over – when all the tears were shed –
He would be a white frocked angel, with a gold thing on his head.
Then she told some garbled story of a kind-eyed Savior’s love
How he built for little children great big playgrounds up above
Where they sang and played at hop-scotch and at horses all the day
And where the beadles or policemen never frightened them away.
This was Nell’s idea of heaven – just a bit of what she’d heard,
With a little bit invented, with a little bit inferred.
But her brother lay and listened, and he seemed to understand,
For he closed his eyes and murmured he could see the Promised Land.
“Yes” he whispered “
(George Robert Sims)
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