Too far for you to see
The fluke and the foot-rot and the
Gnawing the skin from the small bo
The sheep are grazing at Bwlch-y-
Arranged romantically in the usual

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.

I am a man now.
Pass your hand over my brow.
You can feel the place where the b
I am like a tree,
From my top boughs I can see

Nineteen years now
Under the same roof
Eating our bread,
Using the same air:
Sighing, if one sighs,

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

The salmon lying in the depths of
Secretly as a thought in a dark mi
Is not so old as the owl of Cwm C
Who tells her sorrow nightly on th
The ousel singing in the woods of

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.

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

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,

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