(Grwynefechan)
I had something to do here;
so I resigned myself in the littlest month to try,
in mind like a man who’s left off paying his taxes.
There’d been a fall of snow, a great one,
a car’s depth on the untrampled roads
and I was quietly glad
but met with a collarless man
who told me the mountain
was actually crossable, with care
and so, in a sort of rage,
I carried on.
+
The road from the town was like climbing stairs:
ruts stuck in ice,
a huddled church, a chapel, and a pub.
An occasional upward arrow of smoke.
I’d been here once before
so knew, at last, where the cart track was
but now I felt a shiver, like something was wrong,
there was nothing to make a sound at all
between the mountains’ ramparts, white
and glowing in frozen sunlight.
I felt guilty, as if I had no right
to trespass on this silence;
it was like the gap between stars
where nothing but astonishment can live.
For the only time in my life
I was witness to the purity
of shining slopes
and the chance to understand mystery.
I stood and waited for a voice,
a meddler,
to ruffle things up.
+
After struggling, sliding
across the hard snow,
there was the chapel:
four plain walls,
a roof of snow.
Two hundred yards, then the cottage.
Chopping wood was one of the last men alive
who could speak the old language
this end of Brecknock.
Cutting wood and a handful of sheep at his side:
it looked like the first work done.
I wanted to record his dialect. He
looked at me with puzzled eyes –
He could never do that!
I felt I was asking the world’s first man
to speak a language already dying.
+
On the way out,
I felt it again,
but this time more like a light.
Dare I tell others?
No, I am no saint
or doctor.