National Poet of Wales

Carol of the Birds

Winter sun is cold and low,
cry the kite and crake the crow,
bird of flame, bird of shadow,
ballad of blood on snow.

Owls are calling llw, llw, llw,
Kyrie, hullabaloo.

Small birds come without a sound,
starving to the feeding ground,
till the robin with his wound
carols the ice-bound land.

Noctua, hibou, gwdihw,
owl’s lullaby - who? who? who?

The story tells of pain and blood,
the troubles of a restless world,
a star that lights the snowy fields,
towards a newborn child.

Owls are calling llw, llw, llw,
Kyrie, hullabaloo,
noctua, hibou, gwdihw,
owl’s lullaby - who? who? who?

Gillian Clarke
Written for The Guardian, Christmas 2010

The Presence

There were always two of you – the one
that lives inside me, in my blood and bone,
the other, maybe, in a neighbouring room,
a sound, a step on the stair, a voice on the phone.

Sometimes I listen and find the other gone,
an open book, a scarf on the back of a chair,
an echo of your voice, a light left on,
the kettle warm, a scent of you on the air.

Now there is one of us, and one of you,
your presence here, within me. Hand on heart
I touch you, talk with you. One night I dreamed you
placing apples in a bowl, and woke, apart,

the you inside, the other gone, back soon,
as moon returns to earth, and earth to moon.

Gillian Clarke
Commissioned by Tenovus, 2010

Six Bells
28 June 1960

Perhaps a woman hanging out the wash
paused, hearing something, a sudden hush,
a pulse inside the earth like a blow to the heart,
holding in her arms the wet weight
of her wedding sheets, his shirts. Perhaps
heads lifted from the work of scrubbing steps,
hands stilled from wringing rainbows onto slate,
while below the town, deep in the pit
a rock-fall struck a spark from steel, and fired
the void, punched through the mine a fist
of blazing firedamp. As they died,
perhaps a silence, before sirens cried,
before the people gathered in the street,
before she’d finished hanging out her sheets.

Gillian Clarke
 

The Tree

The architect’s vision, a space in the mind
before a line was drawn or walls imagined,
is a poem before sound, before words,
before the sea-lit ceilings shadowed by birds,
bare concrete printed with the memory
of trees that grew with a forest’s slow geometry.
Workmen have tapped things home with a final touch,
tuning the building to its perfect pitch.
Builders with art on their arms are done,
whistling brickies, carpenters, masons gone.
The tree, old yew, first to arrive in the gallery,
glorious, broken, bloody, ablaze, a glare
of flame alive in its dance of death,
art’s sign, and metaphor, and shibboleth.

Gillian Clarke
May 2010
(‘Red Cuts’, by David Nash)
National Poet Gililan Clarke wrote and read 'The Tree'
as part of the re-opening celebrations of Oriel Mostyn Art Gallery
 

Blue Sky Thinking

Let’s do this again, ground the planes for a while
and leave the runways to the racing hare,
the evening sky to Venus and a moon
so new it’s hardly there.
Miss the deal, the meeting, the wedding in Brazil.
leave the shadowless Atlantic to the whale,
its song the only sound sounding the deep
except the ocean swaying on its stem.
Let swarms of jets at quiet airports sleep.
The sky’s not been this clean since I was born.
Nothing’s overhead but pure blue silence
and skylarks spiralling into infinite space,
a pair of red kites flaunting in the air.
No mark, no plane-trail, jet-growl anywhere.

Gillian Clarke
April 2010

Mother Tongue

You’d hardly call it a nest,
just a scrape in the stones,
but she’s all of a dither
warning the wind and sky
with her desperate cries.

If we walk away
she’ll come home quiet
to the warm brown pebble
with its cargo of blood and hunger,
where the future believes in itself,

and the beat of the sea
is the pulse of a blind
helmeted embryo afloat
in the twilight of the egg,
learning the language.

Gillian Clarke
2008

Y Fflam

for Gwyn Thomas

For so long the flame has flickered
at the cromlech, at the crossroad,
in encampment, hovel and castle,
in the courts of minor princes.

Song by firelight, gleam of a sword,
the quiver of a harp string,
reflections in the faces
of those entranced by listening.

The word is out. It crosses
centuries, each one a flame,
every syllable a heartbeat,
every song a torch in the dark.

Gwyn, we meet at the ford
to speak in tongues,
to pass on simple truth,
to torch the lies, the weasel words,

burn off the fog of politics
with poetry’s flame
to illuminate
the mind’s manuscript.

Gillian Clarke
2008

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
written in Washington DC July 2009 as part of Smithsonian Fesitval.

 

The Tenth Decade

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 September between 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.

Gillian Clarke
National Poet Gililan Clarke wrote and read 'The Tenth Decade'
as part of United Nations International Day of Older Persons  30/09/2010.