HIRAETH

(from ORACLAU | ORACLES, forthcoming from the Clutag Press)

1

I would do gratefully what others claim
They could not: relive my adolescence
If I were granted a special licence
To learn Welsh and love you. Great shame
I cannot speak or sing
This language of my late awakening
Nor ask your pardon, Beloved, nor bring
You my bride into the feasting house
Of first desire, dazed by your wedding dress.

2

Tell me, then, what is my sense of abiding.
Ah, love, are we to labour over these
Mechanic etymologies
Who encountered blank forbidding
Before we gave much thought
To language — touching was vivid sight,
Our fingers talked, we were illiterate.
Abide does not hit home as does inure:
I who have swum in love-words shore to shore!

3

With the miscredence of the desperate
I would blow hot on any fancy and forge
From which the myths emerge
Though keeping separate
Your myth and my version;
I owe you that much from our misprision.
Supra and infra chain us to this session:
Guilt in its medieval court desires
To judge by pain, hands grappled to the fires.

4

I yet hear an unsecured door thudding
Elsewhere in the recesses of my head,
Horseboxes for horses now dead.
What brings this bride to her wedding;
Why does she affront me
With steady reproach like Charlotte Brontë
Smiting hubris for gain at ten-and-twenty;
Bidding curt rule dash curvetting emotions,
Causing blindness to betoken impotence?