Perhaps a woman hanging out the wash
paused, hearing something, a sudden hush,
a pulse inside the earth like a blow to the heart,
holding in her arms the wet weight
of her wedding sheets, his shirts. Perhaps
heads lifted from the work of scrubbing steps,
hands stilled from wringing rainbows onto slate,
while below the town, deep in the pit
a rock-fall struck a spark from steel, and fired
the void, punched through the mine a fist
of blazing firedamp. As they died,
perhaps a silence, before sirens cried,
before the people gathered in the street,
before she’d finished hanging out her sheets.
Sarah at Plâs Newydd, Llangollen, 5 July 1788
I leave dear Eleanor at her desk, writing
her letters to the world in the dawn light,
and walk the morning relishing the hour –
birdsong, roses wet from a night of rain.
Maiden’s Blush. Rosa Mundi. Rose d’Amour.
Loosed from the shippon the cows sway down the lane.
The maids sing at their work. Mary brings buttermilk,
a pat of butter glistening from the churn,
for the Bishop of St Asaph comes at nine
to breakfast with us, talk, and walk the garden.
And so we live, and cultivate land and mind.
We read, write, study, make beautiful
a house and garden. Poets and men of letters
visit us – Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley,
the Duke of Wellington, Sir Walter Scott.
Our neighbours too, who took us in from the storm,
the hounds of disapproval at our heels,
when we reached this sheltering valley and this house.
Come. See our vines, our roses. Be our witness
how honest love can shape the wilderness.
Sarah and Eleanor: Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler, the Ladies of Llangollen
Pebble
Weigh two hundred million years
in your hand, the mystery of eras,
a single syllable
pulsing in a pebble.
It quivers in your palm
like the heartbeat of a hare in its form,
with the shindig of ocean, ancient landslips,
rock-fall, storm, the sea’s and centuries’ lapse.
Take in your right hand from the evening sky
that other sad old stone, the moon.
You, Earth, pebble, moon-stone,
held together in the noose of gravity.
Feel the beach shift underfoot, the planet turn,
all Earth’s story in a stone.
Taliesin
Frank Lloyd Wright 1867–1959
A house on a hill, Spring Green, Wisconsin.
From an outcrop of rock, an outcry of water,
he would curb the stone, harness the light of the sun,
bridle the great horse of the river,
raise walls, wings, walkways, terraces, a tower,
slabbed stone horizons on the shining brow.
The mark was on him before birth,
that single drop of gold his mother brought
across the Atlantic in the hold of her heart
from the old home in Ceredigion,
for her imagined boy, her child,
man of her making who would shape a world.
Raised in the old language, the old stories,
he learned his lines from the growth-rings of trees,
wind over water, sandbars, river-currents,
rhythms of rock beneath the ground he stood on,
colours of the earth, his favourite red
the rusting zinc of old Welsh barns, of twlc and beudy.
Taliesin, house of light, of space and vista,
corners for contemplation, halls for fiesta.
He sang a new architecture
from the old, in perfect metre.
twlc and beudy: pigsty and cow house
August Hare
It’s all ears for the strung deeps
of aquifers and springs,
the almost silent arpeggios of the stream,
harp-strings of grasses brushed in passing,
a gasp of pen on paper, rasp
of grasshopper song in the field,
August’s breath in the beech tree,
and the dry sound of chestnut
fingering the wind.
Gleision
for the four miners killed at Gleision drift mine, 15 September 2011
Colours of mountain light, greens, greys,
blues of distance, dusk’s lavenders.
Glâs of rivers and rain and waterways
where streams and heroes are lost
in the hill’s dark hollowed heart,
and nothing’s left but black of the bleak ‘if only’,
the never again of men trapped in the pit
while women wait, and world grows lonely
at the slow procession of the hours, dread
of the imagined and remembered dead.
gleision: the plural of glâs, blue or green
Osprey
Suddenly from the sea
a migrating angel on its way
from Lapland to Africa
took a break at Cwmtydu.
It stayed three weeks
like the moon roosting in an oak.
They fed it like a pet
on buckets of slippery silver
left over from the fish shop.
You could tell it was happy
by the way it splintered the sun
with its snowbird wings.
But its mind was on Africa,
the glittering oceans, the latitudes
sliding beneath its heart.
‘Stay!’ they said. ‘Stay!’
But one day it lifted off and turned south
for the red desert, for the red sun.
Wild Plums
The old trees lean together
one in the arms of the other,
mossed, wind-broken, snag-branched,
seeded a century back by chance.
Our first spring – remember? –
starbursts of petals
from stubborn wood that April,
and every September
sweet nameless plums
to pick from the air as we pass.
At night fruit thudding in grass
is the drumbeat of dreams.
Blue-skinned, gold-fleshed,
simmered and stored in sugar and spice
till a time of thaw, prunus fresh
on the tongue, a tingle of ice.
Harvest Moon
You called me out to the lane – come quick! –
when the red moon rose in a smoking cloud over Pisgah
like a house on a far mountain helplessly burning,
and the stubble fields on the valley slope ablaze,
august and auburn in the last light of the sun
and the first light of the moon.
If I close my eyes now it’s still there, glorious,
and you in the lane watching the golden fields.
When I open them, going, going, gone…
Blue Hydrangeas
You bring them in, a trug of thundercloud,
neglected in long grass and the sulk
of a wet summer. Now a weight of wet silk
in my arms like her blue dress, a load
of night-inks shaken from their hair –
her hair a flame, a shadow against light
as long ago she leaned to kiss goodnight
when downstairs was a bright elsewhere
like a lost bush of blue hydrangeas.
You found them, lovely, silky, dangerous,
their lapis lazulis, their indigos
tidemarked and freckled w
ith the rose
of death, beautiful in decline.
I touch my mother’s skin. Touch mine.
In the Reading Room
He scans the stream, silver-eyed as a heron
searching the surface for what might betray
a halt in the flow, pentameter’s delay,
a master’s faded words, his lexicon.
Before him, found in an old book
marking a page, a longhand manuscript.
Look, where the nib unloaded ink and dipped
and rose again, leaving a blot on the downstroke,
writing by candlelight in another century,
wind in the chimney, maybe, the pen’s small sound.
He writes: ‘Anonymous. Date a mystery.
Some words illegible. No signature found.’
Yet the poem sings in his mind from the silent archive
and all the dead words speak, aloud, alive.
The Plumber
Harry Patch 1898–2009
He’d often work crouched on the floor
his toolbag agape beside him
like a wound.
He’d choose spanner or wrench,
tap for an airlock, blockage, leak,
for water’s sound.
Not a man for talk. His work
a translation, his a clean trade
for silent hands.
Sweet water washed away waste,
the mud, the blood, the dirt,
the dead, the drowned,
the outcry, outfall, outrage of war
transformed
to holy ground.
Listen
to the chant that tranced me thirty years ago
in Samarkand: the call to prayer at dawn;
to that voice again, years and miles from then,
in the blood-red mountains of Afghanistan;
to the secret placing of a double-bomb
at a dark hour in a dusty street;
to the first foot to tread the viper’s head,
the scream that ripped the morning’s rising heat;
to the widow’s wail as she crouches in the rubble
over a son, a brother torn apart;
to a mother dumb with shock who locks her door
and sits alone, taking the news to heart;
to the soldier’s words, it’s World War One out here;
to the rattled air, the growl of the grenade;
to a chanting crowd fisting the foetid air;
to a silent town at a funeral parade;
to ruin ripening in poppy fields;
to barley burnished in the summer air;
to the sound at dusk, cantata of despair,
the holy call become a howl of prayer.
The March
for my late father-in-law, Glyndwr Thomas, miner, Oakdale colliery
Boots and rain drummed the tram roads,
that bitter night in 1839,
potholed and stumbled with mud and stones.
Five thousand men, workers in iron and coal
from mine and furnace, Sirhowy, Ebbw, Rhymni,
heads bowed against the storm like mountain ponies.
Their bones ached from the shift, wind in the shaft,
the heat of the furnaces. Yet on they marched,
their minds ablaze because their cause was right,
through darkness from Ebbw Vale, Blackwood, Pontypool,
faces frozen and stung by the lash of rain,
trudging the roads to Newport through the night.
At the Welsh Oak, Rogerstone, betrayed by daylight,
Frost’s men from the west, Williams’s from the east,
Jones’s men never arrived. The rest struck on
to stand, single-hearted in the square
before the Westgate. Had they stood silent then,
had they not surged forward, had not been shaken
by rage against injustice, had they muzzled
the soldiers’ muskets with a multitude
of silence, had reason spoken,
those steely thousands might have won the day.
But they stormed the doors to set their comrades free,
and shots were fired, and freedom’s dream was broken.
A score dead. Fifty wounded. Their leaders tried,
condemned, transported. The movement, in disarray,
lost fifty years. Then came at last that shift
of power, one spoonful of thin gruel at a time,
from strong to weak, from rich to poor,
from men to women, like a grudged gift.
Archive
They left their mark on pages, stones,
between Usk and Wye, Ebbw, Monnow, bones
in the turned earth of a field, in pit and street,
list and litany, letter, will, receipt,
the etcetera of terraces, a statued square,
all that was left behind of who they were.
Ysgrifen yr afonydd, sibrwd Sirhywi,
Rhymni, Wysg, Gwy ac Ebwy,
geiriau o gariad, stôr o straeon,
gwaith glô, gwaith haearn,
gwaith tir mewn gwynt a glaw,
deilen a dalen yn yr adeilad hwn.
Read in these walls, these pages, history
between the lines of what’s most ordinary.
Ysgrifen yr afonydd…:
Scribble of rivers, whisper of Sirhywi,
Rhymney, Usk, Wye and Ebbw,
words of love, a store of stories,
coal-work, iron-work,
land-work in wind and rain,
on leaf and page in this house.
The Book of Aneirin
Sorrow sharp as yesterday, a lament
passed down and learned by heart
until that moment
when the scribe began to write.
Fifteen centuries later,
words still hymn their worth,
young men, all but one slaughtered,
lost in the hills of the Old North.
Blood-ballad
of the battlefield,
on quires of quiet pages, laid leaf
on leaf like strata of stone, Aneirin’s grief.
The Book of Aneirin: the thirteenth-century manuscript of a sixth-century poem
Lament for Haiti
For the ground that shivered its skin like an old horse,
for the shout of the sun,
the cry of the earth as it broke its heart,
the palace that fell into itself like snow.
For the hospital with its rows of white graves.
For the cathedral that folded on emptiness calling God’s name as it went.
For its psalms of sorrow,
the prayers of the living and dead.
For each crushed house, its cots, cushions and cups,
cooking pots pressed between pages of stone.
For the small lung of air that kept someone alive,
for the rescuer’s hand, for the slip of a life from its grip.
For the smile of daylight
on a woman’s face,
for her daughter dead in the dark.
For the baby born in the rubble.
For tomorrow’s whistling workmen
with their hods of bricks
For scaffolding and walls rising out of the grave
over rosaries of bones.
The Fish Pass
This looks like dreaming – the silk lagoon
reflective with sails, hotels, a flight of gulls,
havened from Severn heaving at the wall.
The rising tide’s the longhand of the moon.
We lean where broken rivers slice the sluice,
Taff and Ely, swollen by upland springs,
now slatternly with silt, out on the loose,
a joyous weight of waters gathering.
The homing salmon hurls against the force,
sensing the sweet in the salt – dŵr, afon –
a line and lure from the mo
untain water course
in its cold blood like love. Silver and driven
it leaps through air, weir, waterfall to spawn
in shallows of the stream where it was born.
afon: river
Ode to Winter
We hoard light, hunkered in holt and burrow,
in cave, cwtsh, den, earth, hut, lair.
Sun blinks. Trees take down their hair.
Dusk wipes horizons, seeps into the room,
the last flame of geranium in the gloom.
In the shortening day, bring in the late flowers
to crisp in a vase, beech to break into leaf,
a branch of larch. Take winter by the throat.
Feed the common birds, tits and finches,
the spotted woodpecker in his opera coat.
Let’s learn to love the icy winter moon,
or moonless dark and winter constellations,
Jupiter’s glow, a slow, incoming plane,