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

It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that comp
me to address it without hope
of a reply. It is a room I enter
from which someone has just

Scarcely a street, too few houses
To merit the title; just a way bet
The one tavern and the one shop
That leads nowhere and fails at th
Of the short hill, eaten away

It seems wrong that out of this bi
Black, bold, a suggestion of dark
Places about it, there yet should
Such rich music, as though the not
Ore were changed to a rare metal

When I was a child and the soft f
Quietly as snow on the bare bough
My father brought me trout from th
From whose chill lips the water so
Dull grew their eyes, the beautifu

I want you to know how it was,
whether the Cross grinds into dust
under men’s wheels or shines brigh
as a monument to a new era.
There was a church and one man

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

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.

With her fingers she turns paint
into flowers, with her body
flowers into a remembrance
of herself. She is at work
always, mending the garment

I was vicar of large things
in a small parish. Small-minded
I will not say, there were depths
in some of them I shrank back
from, wells that the word “God”