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New poem by the National Poet of Wales

Gillian Clarke, the National Poet of Wales, visited Washington recently to take part in the Smithsonian Folkilife Festival. To mark the occassion she wrote a new poem about the famous American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, whose family originally came from a small farm near Gillian's home in Talgarreg, Ceredigion. Frank Lloyd Wright named his home in Wisconsin Taliesin, after the legendary Welsh poet.

Taliesin
for Frank Lloyd Wright
1867-1959

A house on a hill, Spring Green, Wisconsin.
From an outcrop of rock, from an outcry of water,
he would curb the stone, harness the light of the sun,
bridle the great horse of the river,
raise walls, wings, walkways, terraces, a tower,
slabbed stone horizons on the shining brow.

The mark was on him before he was born,
that single drop of gold his mother brought
across the Atlantic in the hold of her heart
from the old home, Blaenralltddu in Ceredigion,
for her imagined boy, her child,
man of her making who would shake the world.

Raised in the old language, the old stories,
he learned his lines from the growth-rings of trees,
wind over water, sand-bars and river-currents,
rhythms of rock beneath the ground he stood on,
colours of the earth, his favourite red
the rusting zinc of old Welsh barns, of twlc and beudy,
the fox-red bracken of the mountainside.

Taliesin, house of light, of space and vista,
corners for contemplation, halls for fiesta.
He sang from the old things a new architecture,
in wood, in stone, in perfect metre.

Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales
written in Washington DC July 2009