#Welsh
I am, as you know, Walter Llywarc… Born in Wales of approved parents… Well goitred, round in the bum, Sure prey of the slow virus Bred in quarries of grey rain.
All right, I was Welsh. Does it… I spoke a tongue that was passed o… To me in the place I happened to… A place huddled between grey walls Of cloud for at least half the yea…
Beasts rearing from green slime— an illiterate country, unable to r… its own name. Stones moved into po… on the hills’ sides; snakes laid t… in their cold shadow. The earth su…
To live in Wales is to be conscio… At dusk of the spilled blood That went into the making of the w… Dyeing the immaculate rivers In all their courses.
It will not always be like this, The air windless, a few last Leaves adding their decoration To the trees’ shoulders, braiding… Of the boughs with gold; a bird pr…
Nineteen years now Under the same roof Eating our bread, Using the same air: Sighing, if one sighs,
It was beautiful as God must be beautiful: glacial eyes that had looked on violence and come to terms with it; a body too huge
In Wales there are jewels To gather, but with the eye Only. A hill lights up Suddenly; a field trembles With colour and goes out
Men who have hardly uncurled from their posture in the womb. Naked. Heads bowed, not in prayer, but in contemplation of the earth they came from,
Dear parents, I forgive you my life, Begotten in a drab town, The intention was good; Passing the street now,
She is young. Have I the right Even to name her? Child, It is not love I offer Your quick limbs, your eyes; Only the barren homage
‘Poems from prison! About what?’ ‘Life and God.’ ‘God in prison? Friend, you trifle with me. His face, perhaps,
Evans? Yes, many a time I came down his bare flight Of stairs into the gaunt kitchen With its wood fire, where crickets… Accompaniment to the black kettle’…
My father is dead. I who am look at him who is not, as once he went looking for me in the woman who was.
I am the farmer, stripped of love And thought and grace by the land’… But what I am saying over the fie… Desolate acres, rough with dew, Is, Listen, listen, I am a man li…