Shot? So Quick, So Clean An Ending? Poem by Keith Shorrocks Johnson

I hear from a friend that Wenlock Books is closing
And she has asked for a valedictory poem from me.

What to say?

More than 60 years ago now, a snub-nose round-top bus
Picked up my cousins and I from the village of Longville
And took us, part of a rowdy and excited group of youths
From the villages between Church Stretton and Much Wenlock,
To the ‘Flix' on Saturday Night to see a Cowboys Western.

I'm not sure of the film - but I do remember the jostling and singing -
Not quite what A.E. Housman had in mind - he didn't do frolicking:

Right you guessed the rising morrow
And scorned to tread the mire you must;
Dust's your wages, son of sorrow,
But men may come to worse than dust.

Possibly, the Wenlock Cinema movie might have been ‘Big Country'
In which Gregory Peck secretly breaks the stallion ‘Old Thunder'
And challenges The Baddies for water rights from the ‘Big Muddy'
After which he wins a stake-out six-shooter duel against Buck
And ends up marrying sweetheart Patricia after the Old Timers kill each other.

Perhaps A.E. would have provided a valedictory for the losers -
[Ignoring Gregory Peck's character the victorious James McKay]:

Far in a western brookland
That bred me long ago
The poplars stand and tremble
By pools I used to know.

And what of the bookshop?

"The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read,
we shall never come to the end of our story-book."

Well that doesn't look so sure nowadays.

They came and were and are not
And come no more anew;
And all the years and seasons
That ever can ensue
Must now be worse and few.