I still recall a memory from my childhood <br />Long years ago and many miles away <br />The robin on the flowering hawthorn singing <br />And the high fields wore their wildflowers of the May. <br /> <br />A black faced horned ewe had given birth to twins that morning <br />One weakly lamb on ground beside her lay <br />And the other suckled happily tail a waggling <br />In the bright sunshine of the early day. <br /> <br />From wood of Claramore a gray crow flew out <br />In darkened face and feathers black and gray <br />One of the birds detested by the mountain sheepmen <br />The only good one a dead one they say. <br /> <br />Beside the weakly lamb the crow alighted <br />And started pecking at the new born's eyes <br />I ran to shoo off the vicious assailant <br />And to aid the helpless 'pain in his bleating cries' <br /> <br />Out of his left side eye the lamb was bleeding <br />But his mother came and licked the blood away <br />From a fate far worse than death perhaps I'd saved him <br />And at least his first would not be his last day. <br /> <br />And I was ten years old as I remember <br />And that was close to fifty years ago <br />That I saved a lamb in a field by Clara Mountain <br />From a painful lingering death of a gray crow.<br /><br />Francis Duggan<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/i-still-recall-a-memory-from-my-childhood/
