La mere, bright, clean, cold, cradling us across: our journey, re-travelled (wellfed mother and wife giving suck, the three yr old a’constant clatter, pater familis lovingly participapapating) with bags and wheels.

Rain fell: I stayed inside, my eyes weary
from the printed word.

barley ripening in the fields
as the farmhands oil and grease
the large new harvester the gaffer
stares at the skies

pealing bells and showering confetti
catching in her hair friends and family
laugh and wave
as the photographer packs his gear

But isn’t it all a bit forced, the gaiety,
the hearty team-talk? It doesn’t work for me.

Ladies with their faces scarf’d collect plastic:
they carry large bags, metre long hook’d iron rods,
and the weight of the world on their shoulders.

If I could sit me peaceful
beneath some stately oak, eating
bread and cheese and drinking mead,
resting in the country’s health,
I’d dream of my endless journey
throughout the land,
through quiet woodlands,
over empty moorland and by the storm-dark sea.

But this just can not be:
the disappearing songbirds
greet another restless day and I -
I feel dismay that, for all the words
of truth and beauty spoken,
young badgers, for instance, still lie and rot
beside the road and people too
suffer so and, well, it seems absurd.

And the saddest thing of all is that,
despite all tradition and epic precedence,
Briseis went willingly, laughing,
and I could only hide my shame
with a show of magnanimity
and write reams and reams on righteous wars
and revengeful violence
that have so touched the lives of men.

I stand on someone else’s hill
watching the clouds and the passing seasons, listening:
echoes of the war reach even here
contending with the hum of motorcars,
calling crows and the shouts of ewes and lambs.
The country is quite set about
with coils of wire and ugly scars,
a deserted battleground which flowers are yet to fill.

And everywhere there are crows.
I hear their cacophony as the sun
rises over England in the watery morning light.
But up through the birch mists and the dark pines,
where the Dovey and the Dee and the Vrynwy meet,
there is only the silence of the wind
and the mountains hidden in the clouds
like brooding Olympians.

So I built a ruined castle in the sand,
trying to recapture her spirit:
it did not stand the test of time.
A raucous gull screams at the sea
and faint music drifts through the drizzle
with the noises of the town
that are like chaff in the wind. After reading poetry
in Barmouth Milkbar, I head for home.

Achilles sat by the tourist gate busking
sentimental tunes whilst his angered heart
imagined his girl twisting and sighing
beneath his onetime lord. He would not serve
again in the war, but walk with his dog
to the hidden camp beside the river;
he would spend his time in meditation
and ambition would not trouble him.

He tuned his lute and played a few vague chords,
nodding thanks to a passer-by who put
a handful of loose change onto his cap.
His dog, bored of sitting still for so long,
ran off into the town to beg for scraps
and to try his luck with the lady dogs.
Achilles half-heartedly followed him.
Athene cried from the cold battlements:

Unhappy with the lines she’d been given
but unable to countermand the will
of Zeus, she used all her gray-eyed wisdom
for the maintenance of the status quo.
She startled a child, who dropped her ice cream,
and was hurried away by her parents.
Then onto the empty stage, greedily
eyeing the ice cream, hopped and limped the crow.

Rhos y Gwalia, so peaceful and beautiful,
was unwelcoming, the spirit of Cain’s murdered brother
shivering in fear of being discovered
without property, a vagrant rustling sheep
on the lonely moor and butchering
the judgement in their eyes, drinking
their life blood and roasting their meat
on a guilty fire of sticks stolen from the hedge.

The south-west corner of PingYao city wall
is not in good repair:
outside is a stinking ditch; inside
are forty-two uneasy foxes with silver fur.

The foxes turn unhappily in their cages
and cry; guard dogs bark;
peacefully and contentedly
the sheep in their pens eat their food.