GILLIAN CLARKE

Selected Poems

In Pisgah Graveyard

Dylan tells me this is a church-garden.

Indeed, these bones, ground seed-small, seem neither

Statc nor dead. The flowers that flourish

Here suggest fertility, the seed-heads

Of late summer brave, casting away

Their foliage, the naked sky. Er côf

On every stone, I count the time each

One was allowed, arrange their families,

Imagined, in the old farms and places

That watch still from the mountains.

The warmth tumbles here like a giant sun

Flower dying and full of glossy seed.

This roughest stone of all, a sand-stone pod

Bursting with words, is Dewi Emrys's grave.

And all around the living corn concedes

fecundity to him. They're proud of him

Here, where full barns count as much as poetry.

He who, they say, knew women as well as words,

Lies in the blond fields blowing to seed

With the threshing machine and the chapel clock.

What do I look for here, with a child's

Hot hand in mine, his hair like ragged robin?

Perhaps the stone words of my first tongue

On a poet's grave that tidies his wild life,

For the savage roar of the trapped sun

Seeding the earth against the stop of winter

When everything that lives will play dead lions,

And the flaming mane of the surrounding wheat

Drops down, lies still until, inside the heart,

The words unfreeze and the poems come again.