Ice

by Gillian Clarke

List the farms, the fields all gone to earth,

  the heroes, heroines; record the deaths

  of beloved friend, lover, father, others

  who fell to the gun, sickness, despair.

  Incant their litany, make rosaries

  of their names, tell their stories.

  Inscribe their names in gold on rows

  of slate like bedheads in the snow.

  Marged Blaen Cwrt, poets of Sarnicol, Mounthill,

  neighbours Tommy, Ithien, Angela,

  and Simon, friend of poets, all now

  fallen with the leaves, the falling snow,

  or that mythic girl taken by Gwyn ap Nudd,

  kept from her lover, locked away

  like a corm in darkness, until winter eased

  to spring and the lengthening day.

  Captor and lover battled through the cold,

  winter with spring, darkness with light.

  till a blackbird sang in a blossoming blackthorn tree,

  and winter let her go, and she was free.

  The Dead after the Thaw

  Starved birds in the snows of ’47,

  when no one had bread to spare.

  A blackbird who sang all summer

  stiff as a glove in the snow,

  its eye not a gold ring,

  but a pane of ice.

  The swan who never came back from the dead

  to her mate on the nest he rebuilt for her.

  The old in city flats found three months dead,

  in stinking garbage, a drift of junk mail, bills.

  A poet dead with private cancer

  in a country town.

  The tramp they found in a field

  after the thaw.

  When they lifted him, meltwater

  streamed from his open mouth.

  Swans

  She was brave in the bitter river,

  the Mary Rose, doomed,

  ice-chalice, lily in bloom.

  Thaw, her feathers and bones dissolve in the flow

  and she’s gone, flower that floated

  so light over death’s undertow.

  In lengthening light he patrols alone

  ferocious on his watery shore

  where the nest from last year and the year before

  has drowned to a dredge of sticks and sludge.

  In full sail, his body ablaze, bridge

  over unfenced water, he waits for her.

  The voice on the phone said,

  ‘He doesn’t know she’s dead.

  There is nothing to be done.’

  Now love rides the river

  like a king’s ship, all wake and quiver,

  and I can’t tell him, it’s over.

  Who Killed the Swan?

  ‘She is mine,’ said the river

  holding the swan on its palm like a lily.

  Said the sky, ‘She is mine to have and to hold,

  my small white cloud of cold.’

  ‘She is mine,’ sighed the wind, wounding the air,

  winnowing water, lifting a wing.

  ‘Mine,’ said the sun, noosing the swan

  with a cold gold ring.

  The cob swims in silence, its neck a question,

  head downcast over water’s mirror.

  He lifts archangel wings to scorch the sky,

  churning water and wind to rise

  above the river, beating alone upstream.

  ‘She is beside me, my soul, my dream,

  the current under my heart.

  Where I fly, she flies beneath me.’

  The Newport Ship

  Tatters of torn sails are gulls drifting

  above the long brown muscles of the Usk

  where the great ship slept five hundred years, a husk

  embalmed in oils of alluvial mud and grit.

  Hands that launch her now into the light of day

  from the restless wrestling waters of Usk and Severn,

  from the silt, the salt, the silence where she lay,

  are tender as those who lift a broken man.

  Now, just to see her, to imagine, is to hear

  the clatter as men lapped planks to build the hull,

  rang home the nails; and sailors drawn by the sea’s pull

  who crossed the unmapped wilderness of fear,

  to beach on this shore. Ship without name abandoned

  to the heave of tides, the scour of rain and wind,

  she gives up her bones again like a queen unbound

  from her winding-sheet, robed in sunlight, crowned.

  Eiswein

  Gathered in deepest winter before dawn,

  fruit frozen to pearl, each milky stone

  stared blind by last night’s moon,

  sweet water of the vine turned ice,

  and ice turned liquid gold, a miracle

  to quicken the dead and ferment the heart.

  Alchemy of water, sugar, frost,

  acids, aromas, and a weight of must,

  remembered sweetness nourished in the dusks

  of summer, like a lost language coming home,

  the old words on the tongue, each one

  a taste of earth, young rhubarb, honey, stone.

  Ring each glass like a bell, and sip – as once

  she’d sip her Christmas sherry from cut glass,

  and sometimes, tripped by the tongue she had denied,

  ‘mêl,’ she’d say, ‘melys,’ wine on her lip,

  bemused by bee-songs from her father’s fields,

  the childhood taste of nectar sucked from clover,

  as over the ford the river-syllables sang

  turning the waterwheel at Nant Mill,

  singing under the bridge, and singing still.

  mêl: honey; melys: sweet

  Thaw

  Tonight the river’s on the move

  in a lovely backstroke, taking the tide

  with a kick of silk thighs, shoulders

  heaving the flood through flux

  and fluency, stroking the keels

  of coot and mallard, a single swan,

  rocking a flock of gulls on its palm,

  coupling grebe, boats at their mooring,

  on currents swollen with melt

  of mountain snows.

  Fluent

  Sleek as a girl in her silk, kissing goodnight

  before slipping out to the dance, she’d leave her scent

  on my pillow, the warmth of her skin on my cheek.

  Cold pooled in the satin folds of her dress,

  the glint of her rings, her animal wrap of fur,

  and she’s gone, night-river slipping its chains,

  fluent, reflective, pulling to sea

  under winter’s weight, freighted

  with ruin and wrack, a burden of birds, words

  dead and alive, trees, driftwood, plastic,

  and all my lost mountain syllables sing

  on her frozen, loosening tongue

  remembered, remembering.

  Nant Mill

  as if her broken words were scattered stones,

  each course of the house unmade like a thought unspoken;

  as if the walls, ruined in rampant sycamore,

  were a language lost to a mumble of elder and bramble,

  her story erased by too much silence;

  as if she stood beside me checking the place

  against the photograph – the field-gate at the bend

  where the lane disappears, the cornerstone of the door

  here where they stood, stilled on the threshold

  in a new century before the wars;

  as if the gap in the wall over the river

  still held the butter churn, its paddle turning

  where the current is slow with a secret dark,

  then out with a shining song across the ford

  where the horse’s hooves once scattered water like sparks;

  as if she left home one day, no turning back


  and nothing to say; as if she might whisper again

  the words for water, horse, mill, stream –

  dŵr, ceffyl, melin, nant – in the tongue

  the Clywedog has always sung.

  Farmhouse

  The house has gone to earth, slipped stone by stone,

  lost to the power of trees to undo a wall,

  unpick a roof slate by slate,

  rain’s alchemy to dissolve the bond in walls,

  rot timbers beam by rafter, unmake dark rooms

  where once ten children slept in feather beds,

  three little ones together, Ceinwen, Elen, Vi,

  cool curls, warm limbs across each other’s bodies,

  on icy air a scrawl of candle smoke,

  the cold clouds of their breath. Gone,

  rooms of daughters, a croglofft of five sons,

  ovens of baking bread, cauldrons of cawl,

  a ring of voices, hoof and clog on stone,

  yr hen iaith’s heartload of silence in the slant

  of sun through trees, a wilderness lost for words.

  croglofft: a room in the roofspace; yr hen iaith: the old language

  Taid

  Samuel Evans 1874–1940

  It’s carnival before the Great War,

  the milk horse dressed in garlands, ribbons, rosettes,

  the cart emblazoned: Nant Mill Dairy.

  My grandfather stands a breathless moment

  in hundred-year-old sunlight

  for the slow click of the shutter.

  The old house on his right, to his left

  the Clywedog deep in trees below the road.

  The reins run slack as water in his hands

  as the secret flow of the river running

  in black silence to break free

  in shining small talk across the ford.

  My three-year-old self remembers: Taid

  in his chair by the fire in the big farm kitchen,

  old man, black-browed, breath lost to emphysema

  from a lifetime milling corn, taking my hand

  to visit the stackyard with sugar for the horse –

  was it Captain? or Belle?

  I climb on the gate he leans on, one sugar lump

  placed on my palm held under the velvet breath.

  And one for me.

  Soon he was dead, died

  in her arms, my mother said, her Data, my Taid,

  as now the old house by the river has died

  in the arms of sycamore and ash.

  In Wern Graveyard

  Thomas Evans 1826–1888, and Elizabeth 1832–1914

  Their names scarcely legible, a verse in Welsh

  erased by a century’s dripping honeydews,

  grave and graveyard lost to nettle and bramble,

  all shape of it gone in a living scribble of trees.

  I try to conjure and keep them, great-grandparents,

  Thomas, Elizabeth, the miller and his wife,

  long gone to earth, their bones absorbed in root

  and thorn, wild flowers, the secret life

  of birds. Our flesh and blood. Our DNA.

  Mine. John’s. Will’s. We bear them in mind,

  scrambling through thorn and thicket to the car

  and home to the farm where every day will end

  and begin with the moan of the cattle’s song

  as they sway to their stalls for milking.

  Lambs

  Thaw. The breaking of waters,

  a breath of frost on the night grass,

  the give of earth underfoot.

  We’re up early and late,

  for these are the blood-days.

  In the field corner a ewe is restless,

  turning, treading her nest of pain,

  absorbed with nothing but the birth

  her body’s ocean brings.

  Her waters smell like the sea.

  She drinks him, his bubbling cries,

  her voice a soft low growl,

  strains again and a second lamb

  comes slippery as a fish in a stream,

  steaming in moonlight.

  We leave them an hour then tempt her in,

  one lamb each dangled before her,

  their hearts in our hands.

  She follows dancing, butting us

  all the way to the pen,

  nudges them to suckle, stamps us away,

  settles to small talk, fresh water, hay.

  The Letter

  from Gwyneth Benbow

  I live her memory as if it were my own:

  a path through woods and four girls racing down

  – Gwyneth, Elen, Ceinwen, Vi – three sisters and a friend

  whose letter out of the blue brought scent and sound

  of a long ago spring day between the wars:

  a river rippling stones, laughter of girls,

  skelter of skirts into the kitchen at Nant Mill.

  Two older sisters set the great elm table,

  loaves cool on a rack, churned butter gleams,

  five handsome brothers tramp in from the fields.

  All over the world a child’s still running home

  through grim street, grimy ginnel, field or slum.

  Inside the old ones, ending their century,

  the child who was, alive in memory,

  and who they were, lover, mother, hero.

  Some lose themselves and us before they go.

  Some live as if they had all the time in the world

  to brave out frailty and pain, still panning for gold.

  Grebes

  They tread water, breast to breast on the Ely,

  feeding each other delicacies from the deep.

  Purge me with hyssop. Asperges me.

  Bring me water asparagus,

  tongues of manna, passion fruit, love-juice,

  buds and blood-beads of pomegranate.

  Out on the river’s a wedding of water and light.

  Bicycle bells in the close

  calling to avenue, heol and hill,

  a humdrum of cars on the overpass,

  the blackbird’s solo in a willow

  to the back garden psalm of the city.

  They couple tiptoe on the river’s sleeve,

  saliva and silvers of weed,

  heart to heart, bill to bill.

  In her delicate crate of bone the future

  is waking, seed’s clutch of stars

  to quicken in the curve of the dark

  for the nest they’ll weave on the water,

  a raft of stems tethered to a reed.

  heol: road

  Burnet Moths

  We walk the old dog on Grangemoor hill

  raised on a city’s waste, the filth of landfill.

  Her tail’s a flag of joy waving though grasses,

  a blur of butterflies, larksong, and all the pleasure

  a generous day can give to human and dog

  walking a meadow nourished on trash and decay.

  By the path, bound to grass stems, spindles of spit,

  chrysalids, papery, golden, torn, unfurling

  sails of damp creased silk, spinnakers filling

  with breath, burnet moth wings of scarlet and black

  like opera stars who live and love and die

  in an hour on the flight of an aria.

  Now it’s her turn to die, her beautiful head on my knee,

  her life an infinity still, till the sedative takes,

  and she crumples to sleep at my feet, folded back

  to before she was born. The kind vet waits.

  Sleep isn’t death. Then the needle, barbiturate

  straight to the heart. Here – and gone.

  Er Gwell, Er Gwaeth

  a’r fodrwy hon y’th briodaf…

  Something about the ring in the blackbird’s eye

  on an April evening; the raptor’s jewelled stare;

  the marriage of sun and rain on dancing water;
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  the circle of my arms round sheets off the line;

  yours bringing armfuls of wood for the fire.

  â’m corff y’th anrhydeddaf…

  Something of touch, taste, tongue, the language

  of hands, those chemical gifts one to the other;

  grace and gesture, silence, reflection,

  that pair for life two swans on a river

  soundlessly sculling the stream, lover to lover.

  â’m holl olud bydol y’th gynnysgaeddaf…

  My dowry a derelict house on a hill, five fields,

  two acres of bluebells under oaks; yours, a vision.

  You made sound the ruin, dreamed space and light,

  a room of oak and glass, let in the sky, the hills,

  and all of Ceredigion, Cariad, in a glance.

  Er Gwell, Er Gwaeth: For Better, For Worse; a’r fodrwy hon y’th briodaf: with this ring I thee wed; â’m corff y’th anrhydeddaf: with my body I thee worship; â’m holl olud bydol y’th gynnysgaeddaf: with all my worldly goods I thee endow; Cariad: darling

  Honesty

  for Imtiaz Dharker