Llangammarch Blaze
There now, lay it all down,
The soft memory and the memory of hard bone.
After the year’s first true frost
A dead sheep lies in the field becoming a dance of hawks and ravens.
And on a lonely hillside unremarked
A blaze has born the babies away.
A smudge of smoke and the light of morning
Is no prayer of peace to ones who wait
Empty-hearted for better news.
The village, warm now in sun, silent.
Thoughts unthought of before – friends vanished,
Those known, now unplaced, a hollowness
Around memory clung to.
It is an uncertain anchor to hold on to –
This world that blinks apart from day to day.
Should we rise and flow like the oak leaves
On the cold dark currents of the Irfon?
Or wrap around like ivy, cling like lichen bloom
To this weathered stone.
We are a thin soil that the wind will blow and the waters leach.
The babies are gone who should be dancing.
The mothers silent, slowly dissappearing.
Pick it back to the bare bones.
Feed the world with our ripped out sorrow.
We are nothing. But we were loved.
Once named, now melted back to everything.
A thin soil on scarred stone.
Golden are the tree tops, a palest blue sky.
The ravens dance in their ring, in and out,
While the sun still shines,
While the sun still shines.
written as the news was emerging about the great and tragic loss in our small village. A family house destroyed by fire in the night, a few children escaping, but many more lost. Llangammarch now besieiged by hordes of prying press and film crews.
simonhlilly 
This is a poem about grief, loss our reactions to death. A response to a village in shock and sorrow, waiting to hear news of survivors, friends and family members. It was not, as someone has misunderstood, written before the events mentioned! ( i had noted that the poem had been composed before the police released the full extent of the fatalities, nothing more sinister than that.)
Reblogged this on Ben Naga and commented:
For some background go to http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-41809852
I have only now come across this poem, Simon and I knew nothing of the tragedy it describes. (I steadfastly avoid radio and TV news and newspapers. A worthy response your poem’
Thank you, Ben. We still reel from the tragedy of it. A small thing in terms of world wide events, but in a small community, nearly everyone is directly affected.
Absolutely.
This is the first I’ve heard about this fire. I’m only glad it was through someone who was a local rather than some hack. Impossible, of course, that any poem could adequately express how people feel, but this one to an outsider rings true.