Halloween Fright Reads, The Way Through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling

This month, I'll be featuring all things spooky-- Halloween Fright reads.  To start, let's read one of the best scary poems every written, by the great Rudyard Kipling.  We'll have another poem tomorrow. The Way through the Woods

By Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)

THEY shut the road through the woods   Seventy years ago. Weather and rain have undone it again,   And now you would never know There was once a path through the woods         5   Before they planted the trees: It is underneath the coppice and heath,   And the thin anemones.   Only the keeper sees That, where the ring-dove broods         10   And the badgers roll at ease, There was once a road through the woods.   Yet, if you enter the woods   Of a summer evening late, When the night-air cools on the trout-ring’d pools         15   Where the otter whistles his mate (They fear not men in the woods   Because they see so few), You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet   And the swish of a skirt in the dew,         20   Steadily cantering through The misty solitudes,   As though they perfectly knew The old lost road through the woods … But there is no road through the woods.