MEIC STEPHENS

Hooters

Night after night from my small bed

I heard the hooters blowing up and down the cwm:

Lewis Merthyr, Albion, Nantgarw, Ty-draw -

these were the familiar banshees of my boyhood.

For each shift they hooted, not a night

without the high moan that kept me from sleep;

often, as my father beyond the thin wall

rumbled like the turbines he drove at work, I

stood for hours by the box-room window,

listening. The dogs of Annwn barked for me then,

Trystan called without hope to Essyllt

across the black waters. Ai, it was their wail

I heard that night a Heinkel flew up

the Taff and its last bomb fell on our village;

we huddled under the cwtsh, making

beasts against the candle's light until the sky

was clear once more, and the hooters

sounded. I remember too how their special din

brought ambulances to the pit yard,

the masked men coming upthe shaft with corpses

gutted by fire; then, as the big cars

moved down the blinded row on the way to Glyntaf,

all the hooters for twenty miles about

began to swell, a great hymn grievingthe heart.

Years ago that was. I had forgotten

the hooters: my disasters, these days, are less

spectacular. We live now in this city:

our house is large,detached and behind fences.

I sleep easily, but waking tonight

found the same desolate clangour in my ears

that from an old and sunken level

used to chill me as a boy - the inevitable hooter

that paralyses with its mute alarm.

How long I have been standing at this window,

a man in the grown dark, only my wife

knows as I make for her whiteside, shivering.