Of age ! ‘Come home, come home. All is forgiven.’
I began a Bible class;
But no one came,
Only Mali, who was not right in the head.
She had a passion for me, and dreamed of the day ...
I opened the Bible and expounded the Word
To the flies and spiders, as Francis preached to the birds.
Narrator
Over the moor the round sky
Was ripening, and the sun had spread
Its wings and now was heading south
Over the sea, where Morgan followed.
It was August, the holiday month
For ministers; they walked the smooth
Pavements of Aber and compared their lot
To the white accompaniment of the sea’s laughter.
The Minister
When I returned, strengthened, to the bare manse
That smelled of mould, someone had broken a window
During my absence and let a bird in.
I found it dead, starved, on the warm sill.
There is always the thin pane of glass set up between us
And our desires.
We stare and stare and stare, until the night comes
And the glass is superfluous.
I went to my cold bed saddened, but the wind in the tree
Outside soothed me with echoes of the sea.
Narrator
Harvest, harvest ! The oats that were too weak
To hold their heads up had been cut down
And placed in stooks. There was no nonsense
Plaiting the last sheaf and wasting time
Throwing sickles. That was a fad of Prytherch
Of Nant Carfan; but the bugger was dead.
The men took the corn, the beautiful goddess,
By the long hair and threw her on the ground.
Below in the valleys they were thinking of Christmas;
The fields were all ploughed and the wheat in.
But Davies still hadn’t made up his mind
Whom they should ask to the Thanksgiving.
The sea’s tan had faded; the old pallor
Was back in Morgan’s cheeks. In his long fight
With the bare moor, it was the moor that was winning.
The children came into Sunday School
Before he did, and put muck on his stool.
He stood for the whole lesson, pretending not to notice
The sounds in his desk: a mouse probably
Put there to frighten him. They loved their joke.
Say nothing, say nothing. Morgan was learning
To hold his tongue, the wisdom of the moor.
The pulpit is a kind of block-house
From which to fire the random shot
Of innuendo; but woe betide the man
Who leaves the pulpit for the individual
Assault. He spoke to Davies one day:
Davies
Adultery’s a big word, Morgans: where’s your proof?
You who never venture from under your roof
Once the night’s come; the blinds all down
For fear of the moon’s bum rubbing the window.
Take a word from me and keep your nose
In the Black Book, so it won’t be tempted
To go sniffing where it’s not wanted.
And leave us farmers to look to our own
Business, in case the milk goes sour
From your sharp talk before it’s churned
To good butter, if you see what I mean.
Narrator
Did you say something?
Don’t be too hard on them, there were people here
Before these and they were no better.
And there’ll be people after may be, and they’ll be
No better; it is the old earth’s way
Of dealing with time’s attrition.
Snow on the fields, snow on the heather;
The fox was abroad in the new moon
Barking. And if the snow thawed
And the roads cleared there was an election
Meeting in the vestry next the chapel.
Men came and spoke to them about Wales,
The land they lived in without knowing it,
The land that is reborn at such times.
They mentioned Henry Richard and S.R. – the great names;
And Keir Hardie; the names nobody knew.
It was quite exciting, but in the high marginal land
No names last longer than the wind
And the rain let them on the cold tombstone.
They stood outside afterwards and watched the cars
Of the speakers departing down the long road
To civilisation, and walked home
Arguing confusedly under the stars.
The Minister
Winter was like that; a meeting, a foxhunt,
And the weekly journey to market to unlearn
The lesson of Sunday. The rain never kept them
From the packed town, though it kept them from chapel.
Drive on, farmer, to market
With your pigs and your lean cows
To the town, where the dealers are waiting
And the girl in the green blouse,
Fresh as a celandine from the spring meadows,
Builds like a fabulous tale
Tower upon tower on the counter
The brown and the golden ale.
Narrator
A year passed, once more Orion
Unsheathed his sword from its dark scabbard;
And Sirius followed, loud as a bird
Whistling to eastward his bright notes.
The stars are fixed, but the earth journeys
By strange migrations towards the cold
Frosts of autumn from the spring meadows.
And we who see them, where have we been
Since last their splendour inflamed our mind
With huge questions not to be borne?
Morgan was part of the place now; he was beginning
To look back as well as forwards:
Back to the green valleys, forward along the track
That dwindled to nothing in the vast moor.
But life still had its surprises. There was the day
They found old Llywarch dead under the wall
Of the grey sheep-fold, and the sheep all in a ring
Staring, staring at the stiff frame
And the pursed lips from which no whistle came.
The Minister
It was my biggest funeral of all; the hills crawled
With black figures, drawn from remote farms
By death’s magnet. ‘So sudden. It might have been me.’
And there in the cheap coffin Llywarch was lying,
Taller than you thought, and women were trying
To read through their tears the brass plate.
It might have been Davies ! Quickly I brushed
The black thought away; but it came back.
My voice deepened; the people were impressed.
Out in the cold graveyard we sang a hymn,
O fryniau Caersalem; and the Welsh hills looked on
Implacably. It was the old human cry.
But let me be fair, let me be fair.
It was not all like this, even the moor
Has moods of softness when the white hair
Of the bog cotton is a silk bed
For dreams to lie on. There was a day
When young Enid of Gors Fach
Pressed an egg into my hand
Smiling, and her father said:
‘Take it, Morgans, to please the child.’
never heard what they said after,
But went to my bed that night happy for once.
I looked from my top window and saw the moon,
Mellow with age, rising over the moor;
There was something in its bland expression
That softened the
moor’s harshness, stifled the questions
Struggling to my lips; I made a vow,
As other men in other years have done,
To-morrow would be different. I lay down
And slept quietly. But the morrow woke me
To the ancestral fury of the rain
Spitting and clawing at the pane.
I looked out on a grey world, grey with despair.
Narrator
The rhythm of the seasons: wind and rain,
Dryness and heat, and then the wind again,
Always the wind, and rain that is the sadness
We ascribe to nature, who can feel nothing.
The redwings leave, making way for the swallows;
The swallows depart, the redwings are back once more.
But man remains summer and winter through,
Rooting in vain within his dwindling acre.
The Minister
I was the chapel pastor, the abrupt shadow
Staining the neutral fields, troubling the men
Who grew there with my glib, dutiful praise
Of a fool’s world; a man ordained for ever
To pick his way along the grass-strewn wall
Dividing tact from truth.
I knew it all,
Although I never pried, I knew it all.
I knew why Buddug was away from chapel.
I knew that Pritchard, the Fron, watered his milk.
I knew who put the ferret with the fowls
In Pugh’s hen-house. I knew and pretended I didn’t.
And they knew that I knew and pretended I didn’t.
They listened to me preaching the unique gospel
Of love; but our eyes never met. And outside
The blood of God darkened the evening sky.
Narrator
Is there no passion in Wales? There is none
Except in the racked hearts of men like Morgan,
Condemned to wither and starve in the cramped cell
Of thought their fathers made them.
Protestantism – the adroit castrator
Of art; the bitter negation
Of song and dance and the heart’s innocent joy –
You have botched our flesh and left us only the soul’s
Terrible impotence in a warm world.
Need we go on? In spite of all
His courage Morgan could not avert
His failure, for he chose to fight
With that which yields to nothing human.
He never listened to the hills’
Music calling to the hushed
Music within; but let his mind
Fester with brooding on the sly
Infirmities of the hill people.
The pus conspired with the old
Infection lurking in his breast.
In the chapel acre there is a grave,
And grass contending with the stone
For mastery of the near horizon,
And on the stone words; but never mind them:
Their formal praise is a vain gesture
Against the moor’s encroaching tide.
We will listen instead to the wind’s text
Blown through the roof, or the thrush’s song
In the thick bush that proved him wrong,
Wrong from the start, for nature’s truth
Is primary and her changing seasons
Correct out of a vaster reason
The vague errors of the flesh.
Children’s Song
We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower.
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.
The Village
Scarcely a street, too few houses
To merit the title; just a way between
The one tavern and the one shop
That leads nowhere and fails at the top
Of the short hill, eaten away
By long erosion of the green tide
Of grass creeping perpetually nearer
This last outpost of time past.
So little happens; the black dog
Cracking his fleas in the hot sun
Is history. Yet the girl who crosses
From door to door moves to a scale
Beyond the bland day’s two dimensions.
Stay, then, village, for round you spins
On slow axis a world as vast
And meaningful as any poised
By great Plato’s solitary mind.
Lament for Prytherch
When I was young, when I was young !
Were you ever young, Prytherch, a rich farmer:
Cows in the byre, sheep in the pen,
A brown egg under each hen,
The barns oozing corn like honey?
You are old now; time’s geometry
Upon your face by which we tell
Your sum of years has with sharp care
Conspired and crossed your brow with grief.
Your heart that is dry as a dead leaf
Undone by frost’s cruel chemistry
Clings in vain to the bare bough
Where once in April a bird sang.
Song at the Year’s Turning
Shelley dreamed it. Now the dream decays.
The props crumble. The familiar ways
Are stale with tears trodden underfoot.
The heart’s flower withers at the root.
Bury it, then, in history’s sterile dust.
The slow years shall tame your tawny lust.
Love deceived him; what is there to say
The mind brought you by a better way
To this despair? Lost in the world’s wood
You cannot stanch the bright menstrual blood.
The earth sickens; under naked boughs
The frost comes to barb your broken vows.
Is there blessing? Light’s peculiar grace
For strange marriage. Voices in the wind
Weave a garland where a mortal sinned.
Winter rots you; who is there to blame?
The new grass shall purge you in its flame.
Invasion on the Farm
I am Prytherch. Forgive me. I don’t know
What you are talking about; your thoughts flow
Too swiftly for me; I cannot dawdle
Along their banks and fish in their quick stream
With crude fingers. I am alone, exposed
In my own fields with no place to run
From your sharp eyes. I, who a moment back
Paddled in the bright grass, the old farm
Warm as a sack about me, feel the cold
Winds of the world blowing. The patched gate
You left open will never be shut again.
The Poacher
Turning aside, never meeting
In the still lanes, fly infested,
Our frank greeting with quick smile.
You are the wind that set the bramble
Aimlessly clawing the void air.
The fox knows you, the sly weasel
Feels always the steel comb
Of eyes parting like sharp rain
Among the grasses its smooth fur.
No smoke haunting the cold chimney
Over your hearth betrays your dwelling
In blue writing above the trees.
The robed night, your dark familiar,
&nbs
p; Covers your movements; the slick sun,
A dawn accomplice, removes your tracks
One by one from the bright dew.
Priest and Peasant
You are ill, Davies, ill in mind;
An old canker, to your kind
Peculiar, has laid waste the brain’s
Potential richness in delight
And beauty; and your body grows
Awry like an old thorn for lack
Of the soil’s depth; and sickness there
Uncurls slowly its small tongues
Of fungus that shall, thickening, swell
And choke you, while your few leaves
Are green still.
And so you work
In the wet fields and suffer pain
And loneliness as a tree takes
The night’s darkness, the day’s rain;
While I watch you, and pray for you,
And so increase my small store
Of credit in the bank of God,
Who sees you suffer and me pray
And touches you with the sun’s ray,
That heals not, yet blinds my eyes
And seals my lips as Job’s were sealed
Imperiously in the old days.
Pisces
Who said to the trout,
You shall die on Good Friday
To be food for a man
And his pretty lady?
It was I, said God,
Who formed the roses
In the delicate flesh
And the tooth that bruises.
The Return
Coming home was to that:
The white house in the cool grass
Membraned with shadow, the bright stretch
Of stream that was its looking-glass;
And smoke growing above the roof
To a tall tree among whose boughs
The first stars renewed their theme
Of time and death and a man’s vows.
A Welshman to any Tourist
We’ve nothing vast to offer you, no deserts
Except the waste of thought
Forming from mind erosion;
No canyons where the pterodactyl’s wing
Falls like a shadow.
The hills are fine, of course,
Bearded with water to suggest age
And pocked with caverns,
One being Arthur’s dormitory;
He and his knights are the bright ore
That seams our history,
But shame has kept them late in bed.
The Last of the Peasantry
What does he know? moving through the fields
And the wood’s echoing cloisters
With a beast’s gait, hunger in his eyes