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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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kyleakin sky

9

Seven Tears: Lamentations

I would see them all gone:
The small black rags of malice
The small black rags of nightmare
A poison of harsh cold iron will.
Forbidding beauty, disdaining.
Who turns the flame of hope
To worms of despair.
A curse of faith despising life.

I would wish the gentle ones
Back in the deep glens,
By the loch-side:
The long chant, the ordered hours,
Prayers for all, care for all.
Chant in the cold night,
Praise in the dawn,
A haven, a refuge,
A fire of openness.

I would not leave the hills silent,
Nor barren, nor unsung.
I would not have them feared,
Nor mocked, nor misunderstood.

At very least, a common prayer:
The song of gathering in,
The song of weaving,
The song of sinew and patience,
The rock and sway of fruitful hours,
A song of peaceful construction.

This silent, bitter solace of hearts
This leaden, sullen lock-jaw –
A walled, guarded desolation
In the midst of shining presence.

We would not know freedom, even,
Were we feeding at its warm breast,
So torn and twisted our hearts
Have become.
So cursed by the darkness
Left to breed inside so bitter,
Bitter, wormwood would be sweet.

This long rent severance,
This decree of exile,
This proclamation of abandonment,
This churning mistrust peeling
Mind from heart, half from half,
Mothers mocked, sons burst open,
Daughters broken.

It was not the cry of a fox
At the cold centre of the night,
Nor gull ghosting on the water
That woke me into darkness.
It was the despair of a woman
Echoing hills and empty streets.
In the certain dark, ill-lit,
Wordlessly crying out,
Summoning the flicker of pain.
The endless distraught
Eternal wringings of sorrow,
Bloody clouts reddening
Water-lapped stone,
Consonants of spite,
Howling, sobbing vowels
Down the long years.
When shall it cease?

I, too, should leave by that bridge,
(would I could),
Leave the sullen solidity of pain,
The unforgotten sin, remorseless blame,
Not wasting one more word
On the forlorn rigidity of final hope
They cling to who have not already
Released clawing fingers and drowned.

I, too, would return to the twilight dance,
A weaving with purpose and poise,
An upholding, a reimbursing,
A constant, belonging chord.
Chant and chanter, strings of song,
No need, ever, to remember or forget.

Free from those who would sever the root
To free the tree, who would wash the soil
From each endeavour, strip the river
From its valley, would feed their children
To a red mouth of destruction

Dawn Kyleakin2

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