LAMINATION
These words have gathered themselves together
Like swallows in a cooling sky.
Dark news from the cities
Where fools hold sway.
The stone at Llanlleonfel hardly speaks,
Stuttered in silence, its lines unread.
The stone of Llanynis taken to safety,
A kind replica gathers moss in an empty field.
The stones of Llanddewi Cwm, the woven stones,
Broken and holy, no one sees any more.
Words there are dying, eagle cries scratched and fading.
The stones of Gelynos subside into their own graves,
Locked in roots, bound by promises, muttering names.
The stone at Llanwrtyd, the old view subverted,
The road to world’s roof pitted, empty.
Is it still there in the darkness?
A mystery looking out, an old palm resting in an old lap,
As if after despair.
The stones of Llanafanfawr, huddled safe from storm,
Root words that mean their opposites, that savour contradiction.
The stone of Llangamarch, bestowing its blessing on jackdaws,
By the river’s edge in the water’s roar.
A storm of awen stripping away discourse.
A scroll rolled and unrolled a galaxy away.
The stone of Cilmeri, where hope died,
Where hope is offered flowers continually fading.
A place to lose heads, to find a well of eventual peace.
All these stones cold, hard, mute.
They can not tell of our futures here,
Though they remember the past,
And that, they all know, is the same thing.
—
The stone of Llanlleonfel is an Early Dark Age memorial to two fallen Welsh warriors inside the small church at Lllanlleonfel. The script is hardly readable now, the exploits forgotten.
The stone at Llanynis is a deftly carved pillar cross, removed to a local museum, but replaced with a fair reproduction, leaning isolated in a cleared graveyard.
The stones of Llanddewi Cwm, are no longer in situ. They consisted of deeply carved interlace patterns, once part of a free-standing cross stone.
Gelynos is an early Non-Comformist chapel site on a hillside road. Its walls long gone, its gravestones tipped and sinking into the earth.
Llanwrtyd stone is a memorial stone with abstracted Celtic-style head, lost within the depths of an old church nave.
The stones of Llanafanfawr are enigmatic geometrical carvings now placed into the porch wall.
The Llangamarch carving is above the church porch. It has a representation of a figure holding a spiral below a sun wheel cross.
The stone at Cilmeri was placed last century in memory of the death of the last great Llewelyn, Prince of Wales, ambushed and slain here.
All these stones are in, or look over, the Irfon Valley in mid-Wales, where I live. The title ‘Lamination’, which is name given to the weathering deterioration of these old carvings, is also a play on ‘lamentation’, particularly the Biblical Lamentations of Jeremiah, so popular in the Reformation for its relentless descriptions of ungodliness and destruction of nations.
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