Briony Tallis was the child’s name
An aspiring writer who was to blame
For Robbie Turner’s false imprisonment
When fact and fiction blurred beyond devilment

Did Briony really see the scholar copulating in the bushes?
Pressed up against her young cousin – only hearing their hushes
She swore blind that she heard Robbie’s breathless pants
Beyond doubt she said so he wouldn’t stand a chance

Convinced she was of Paedophilia
after reading his lewd note to fair Cecilia
‘Assault!’, she cried after she walked in on them in the poorly lit library.
Robbie’s mouth on her sister’s and his hands doing something far from honorary.

‘Sex pest, depraved, maniac, unsafe!’ she defamed
And stripped he was of a scholarship though innocent he claimed.
But poor Robbie wasn’t a menace – just a young man in love
But in her naievete she never considered the above.

Adamant was she of what she saw, heard and read
That no other reasonable explanation entered her infantile head.
The boy’s only crime was lust of a girl
Wholly ignorant of the horror and pain that would unfurl

Cecilia never did forgive the lies that Briony purged
An imagination that ran wild but it was Robbie who was scourged.
A couple’s happiness destroyed by a child’s unfounded suspicions.
Their world torn apart after a careless exposition.

Now older and wiser, Briony Tallis has come to learn
That she has regrets a plenty from when she was a girl.
Yes. She had regrets a plenty from when she was a girl.