WAR HAS CAST THEM
War has cast them off the mountain
And they have never yet returned
Except their tattered ghosts minding flocks
And the wind and the rain and the ravens.
The stone, green under soil.
The soil, black under sedge.
The distance sailing above cloud
Shaped by worlds beyond reach,
Reciting the names, reciting the names.
—
SOME GO
They weave these times of plague
with threads of brighter days.
Sharing the names of farms and families:
Nain, hen nain, hen hen nain,
and the tales of the tales she told.
The hearths swept and re-laid
for an eventual return
after the storms of the world blow by;
the family bible left open at Lamentations.
Some go into the hills,
finding the silent walls
moss green, wide strewn;
the signs all but lost,
like the songs of living and dying:
the songs of harvest, the songs of planting,
the songs of weaving, the songs of lamenting,
the songs of losing and of finding.
It is the songs of living
that we have lost forever;
the songs of simple doing
that told us we were not alone
in feeling the rhythms of breath
as muscles worked and tasks completed.
It is all silent in the hills now.
cloud and curlew,
raven and lark.
Memories fade
as the farmhouse walls
tumble under moss.
Hold on to the names,
the farms, the families,
the cherished dead.
Over their heads
the world changes.
Plague days,
words dying.
—
The Epynt is an area of high uplands between the Brecon Beacons and the Cambrian Mountains in Mid Wales. A strong, rural, Welsh speaking area, the Epynt was cleared of people at the start of the Second World War so that the land could become an artillery training area. Eighty farms were given a few months to pack up and leave, breaking and dispersing a robust culture to find their own way miles away from their homes. After eighty years the land is still possessed by the government and this year many descendents have got together to remember their families, where they lived, where they moved, who remembers tales of the old days.
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