- for TaidHe grew up in the top house on the hill,
Was still young when they left for the war
And when he came back it felt as if a lifetime
Had passed. Yet thinking back to those days
Of childhood, he whittled this whistle from a twig,
They drift about like ghosts in a mist. The jackdaws
And the sheep are somewhere about. Today
More hill walkers come with the train, they
Peer at the maps and the lie of the ground.
_______
gw-2010
I think a lifetime had passed, Poet - these young men who go to war often come back as old men.
ReplyDeleteI love the rhythm of lull of the words - one can't read them without a welsh accent intruding - it creates an apt mood.
ReplyDeleteThank you Pat and Gerald. I often wonder what the Great War, a family feud between 3 or 4 royal cousins, had to do with my family minding its own business, living in the highest and bleakest slate house in the mountains of Wales without any services at all, and why one of our number, and many boys and men, shepherds and quarrymen, from these hills had to "go over the top" at Haig's Battle of the Somme, in a place they'd never heard of, but where 1,250,000 were killed. Still can't quite figure it out.
ReplyDelete