JOHN TRIPP

Bards

In places where the language is spoken

    they dissolve into the people,

asking for no pompous rank

    or red carpet to their doors.

Sometime a cap is doffed

    to one who has reached an eminence

of years and chairs of honour.

    I remember an old lady who said:

'I see Mr Llewelyn has died.

    I didn't know he was a poet.'

Fame for them is a tarnished bauble at best.

    (The narrowness can eke itself

into living: a small place brings its own

    horror to the sensitive, when drip of trivia

bolts him behind his limited tongue.)

    Parson, teacher, tailor, clerk,

in rooms with the candles guttering

    they wrote what they felt or saw

on pages that may always be lost

    on the outside world. Yet there are two

or three who would hold their skill

    with Europe's paragons.

For more than a thousand years

    their role hasn't changed,

nor would they wish it to plant them

    apart from their fertile soil.