Watchkeeper for Gwilym Williams
Pixels break a thousand spaces where floating faces rise.
The heart’s machine tells us there is more than this.
Sun clambers over hills to a black cross.
But if we can , we return wrestling with nostalgia.
That shines your eyes back into it,
The hurt of humanity, its exoskelelton
breathing in villages, towns, cities mourning cemented onto walls.
branding the world , stammering untold prayers.
Plumed objects placed in corners looking back at us. Your poems tell me how you loved these lanes: Primroses, brambles, lichen , moss, birches thickening. Walking to school, a prison to a small boy with dirty knees you chewed a pencil until teeth touched lead. Then something flecked its ambition : An inscape mediated the inscribed hymn of fire, hearth , light. Patterns on water unlocked a spell of belonging homing into books.
Yet you, I, we, they, believe in something more: Pan welaf athrofa y werin yn uno fy nghenedl i gyd. Something that exceeds self makes space for thought– beyond the hardware that litters our sky. And in a village a woman tells a child : On his return he could not walk into the kitchen. He asked for paraffin to douse the lice that covered his body. Under a willow he stripped before he could be touched. Nerys Williams Commissioned by Literature Wales and funded by the Welsh Government for the 2019 Holy Glimmers of Goodbyes event CYMRU’N COFIO WALES REMEMBERS 1914−1918 |
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