JOHN TRIPP

Dewi Emrys

Vagabond with a taste for wine and people,

he took four chairs and a crown,

then pawned the crown in Swansea for a couple of notes.

He slept under paper on the beggars' benches

and in Cardigan barns, glad of a crust of bread

or a ladle from the churn. On street corners

through a screen of rain you might see him

hitch up his collar beneath the dripping troughs.

He should have been a cocky troubador

stepping from tavern to tavern

with his slung lute, singing for his supper.

Our century could find no home for his heart.

What trouble takes a man of skill and vision

to the skidding edge? A wayfarer like all of us

but haunted, he journeyed from a warm centre

high in the bright pavilion of bards

to the lost shabby rim.

I think of him when he was alone

with only a pen and a gaping page,

facing an old language with humility,

testing the sounds, turning and turning the lines,

drumming their response through his head.

He sits with Dylan in that narrow room

where the lyric is measured, sealed and folded

into himself, where the craft is always stubborn.

I saw him once in a smoky distance

Outside his nest at Talgarreg, sweeping the leaves.

He wore an old fisherman's hat and a leather jerkin,

seeming peaceful at last within that silent frame.

The moss is over him now, the briar and ivy.

His mark is a perfect quill and a brimming jug,

a short poem shaped like a heart.