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Ancestors
Meditations on Gerallt Lloyd Owen's awdl 'Cilmeri'


                   (1)

       Er bod bysedd y beddau
       Yn deilwriaid doluriau,
       Cnawd yn co’ nid yw’n cau.

                    Gerallt Lloyd Owen   ‘Cilmeri’

        Even though the fingers of graves
        Are tailors of wounds
        Cut flesh in memory does not close.

Graves are tailors of grief
Sowing the seams of sorrow.

The needle slips through, threading
The shrouds of memory as it comes and goes.

Shrouded wounds in the mind’s eye
Are open despite death’s harrow.

The sword that cuts, resheathed
Does not stanch the blood that flows.

The feathered arrow cannot be unstrung
As if unsprung from the bent bow.

Though lost, memory remains
A trace of perception even so.


Fingers of graves – can these
Touch and feel the life within?

Feel, that is, the fabric of life
Cut its cloth, revive its skin.

Can the stealth with which they steal
Sew up a coat, that could be lived in.

Or are these stitches in time
Saving what should be shriven?

Should the scar still show to slow
The erosion of memory, or become hidden?

May grief continue to cut, or may it mellow,
Fade to resonance or fuel anger when bidden?


Is it the cynghanedd that calls,
Creeps over cemetery walls to correlate pain

Where the cement of sorrow seams
The bricks that divide from what remains

Of hurts that are history? Interlocked
Words building the past in the present again.

Rehearsing the old play, the hearsay
Of history recalling its story, it’s old refrain.

Haunting the halls of memory, avoiding
Death’s oblivion, believing fames’

Continuum beyond death, continues
A life, a legacy re-claimed.


So it’s a stitch-up, these graves
Tying the knots of a deed done,

Closing the open sores of grief
Tricking it up as a battle won

And lost at the same time:
A seal set on a fading horizon

Broken by memory, a mind
Re-calling a gaping wound, how blood runs

Through the runnels of history
Where the mind’s eye watches. Scum

On the clear pool of a perfect past
Clouds, yet reveals, the battle to come.


                    (2)

     Llawer llef druan fel ban fu Gamlan
[…..]
       Poni welwch chwi hynt y gwynt a’r glaw
       Poni welwch chwi’r deri’n ymdaraw
       Poni welwch chwi y môr yn merinaw – ‘r tir?
      Gruffudd ap yr Ynad Coch

      ‘Lament for Llywelyn’ (13th C.)

       Not since Camlan has there been such weeping
[…..]
       Do you not see the way of the wind and the rain
       Do you not see the oaks clashing
       Do you not see the the sea scouring the land?


Who counts as ancestors? A prince
Of noble blood, his bard, those who cry in fear
As the winds smash the trees and the seas crash
On a deserted shore? What is entailed

In these words of the thirteenth and the twentieth
Centuries recalling a wound that gapes
Open-mouthed in the face of the grave’s ministrations
Unstitching a death from which there is no escape.

If graves stitch wounds, it is in the mind
Only, which is where, also, they remain open.
Ancestors are like that, elusive in their points
Of reference, but real too when they come again.

                         (3)

           Hen bethau anghofiedig teulu dyn                                                                                                           Waldo Williams  ‘Cofio’

            Old, forgotten things of the human family


It’s not in the gene pool that we angle
For the heart’s inheritance; the bloodstream
Of meaning, the significance we cast for,
Is a better catch.  Who can untangle

Bloodlines back through the generations
Other than the current that is still clear
In the many-tributaried river of story,
Of song, of the many calibrations

Of who and what we are. Identity
Shifts, or is maintained, not in the blood
But with allegiance to the life lived
In the bonds of belonging, a shared history.

So if the grave opens, if the body
Sewn into earth’s fabric unravels
And re-forms, if the tale it has to tell
Is vivid, and it speaks to us directly

It lives more profoundly than a visiting ghost
And we live with it, and it with us,
Not haunting our lives but breathing
The same air: not hidden but close.
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