EMYR HUMPHRIES

Fragments From a Celebration

(Adapted from the lines by R. Williams Parry and Saunders Lewis)

Verses 3, 4, 5 + 7

The tramways climb from Merthyr to Dowlais

The slime of a snail on the mound of slag

This was once Cymru, now a dump

With cinemas derelict and rain on the barren tips.

The pawnbrokers have shut up shop: the labour exchange

Rules this dead land:

The face of the earth crawls with the last corruption:

My life is likewise, seconder to those motions

That move from committee to committee

To jack the old country back on its creaking feet:

Better maybe to stand on the corner in Tonypandy

Looking up the valley and down the valley

At a scattered wreck sinking in the mud of despair

Stand like a tip, men and rubble equally discarded.

We are already dead and our eyes are dust

We sucked the drugged waters of death in our mother's milk

We cannot bleed as our forefathers bled

Or work with hands that have grown without thumbs:

When our feet are crushed in a fall

That makes it easier to bow in the free clinic

Raise a cap with respect to a wooden leg the insurance and

               Sir Alfred Mond's pension:

We are tamed. We no longer nurse a proud language or any 

                                                                              resentment

And our gift to the world is a row of Labour M.P.'s...................

Michael, lover of mountains, pray in our hills.

Michael, friend of the maimed and the sick, remember Wales.