The poetry attempted by you as part of Extended Writing in Legend of Northland. (The woodpecker recounting her story to her kids)
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Away, away in Northland
Where the hours of day are few,
And the nights are so long in winter
That they cannot sleep through them.
Where legends are passed on
To scare the children to discipline
And make the evil within be gone.
They tell them a curious story,
which I believe to be true
and thus you may learn a lesson
if I tell the tale to you.
Once, when the Saint Peter
lived in our world,
And walked about, preaching
To his children, for be far from sins.
He came to the door of a cottage
He stood seeing
A being baking cakes
And making them on hearths.
Being faint with fasting,
for the sun was setting
He asked her for a getting
from the store of cakes
To give him single one.
Thus, she made a small cake
But as it baking lay,
She looked at it and thought it seemed
Too large to give away.
Therefore, she kneaded and kneaded
A smaller cake, but each one
Seemed too much to give away.
She foolishly said "My cakes that seem too small
When I eat of them myself
Are yet to large to give away"
So she put them on the shelf.
Good Saint Peter grew angry
For he was hungry and faint
And surely such a woman
Was enough to provoke a saint.
He said "You are far too selfish
To dwell in human form,
To have both food and shelter,
And fire to keep you warm."
So he cursed her, for that is
The punishment of a sinned human.
She shall build as the birds do,
And shall get scanty food
By boring, and boring, and boring,
All day, in the hard dry wood.
She went out the chimney, without uttering a word
As a woodpecker known to have angered the Saint himself.
She wore a scarlet cap on her head,
And that left the same,
But all the rest of her clothes were burned
Black as a coal in the flame.
Every country boy and every woodpecker
Has seen her in the woods,
for she is none other than, I.
