THEN a vineyard pulled over, uprooted and sacked
at Peppermint Farm, & the livestock was rough-slaughtered
or drove off into the mist at Sweetmeal Farm
which was equally remote, these places are hopeful crofts
at the far end of Aetolia, practically in the wood,
they scrape by with grants from the military,
yes, thin scrapings of marginal land, moss & hard bog,
not many people get up there and what they say
is a bit doubtful, you tend to forget because of the names,
but somehow the news drifted into fly-ridden Pleuron.
It took a grip on the public, you know, a bloody mystery.

And no doubt at the big house they got a better picture:
more information, and they was more mixed up in it --
because Oeneus & more especially his wife,
she owned land or leased it all through to Calydon,
and constant travellers all of them, in well-armed parties
the agents and the children (who was all grown-up now)
sweated through Aetolia on diplomacy, on business.

Not that other folks kept silent when they should of,
ashamed to display their ignorance.
Far from it. The bars was thick with rumour,
they grew cosy and sold a lot of drinks on the basis of
monstrous historical precedents, the engirdled
progeny of a lake stung into menace by leeches
& churning loam with fiery saurian tails
(the plural tails of a jellyfish)