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.

Hers is the clean apron, good for
Or lamp to embroider, as we talk s
In the long kitchen, while the whi
Turns to pastry in the great oven,
Sweetly and surely as hay making

The furies are at home
in the mirror; it is their address
Even the clearest water,
if deep enough can drown.
Never think to surprise them.

Moments of great calm,
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak; the air a staircase

It is calm.
It is as though
we lived in a garden
that had not yet arrived
at the knowledge of

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’

Iago Prytherch his name, though,
Just an ordinary man of the bald
Who pens a few sheep in a gap of c
Docking mangels, chipping the gree
From the yellow bones with a half-

We met
under a shower
of bird-notes.
Fifty years passed,
love’s moment

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.

‘Poems from prison! About
what?’
‘Life and God.’ ‘God
in prison? Friend, you trifle
with me. His face, perhaps,