Welsh Journals

In winter I have seen Him on the black cross of a tree With crows under his armpits and about his chest Pecking with cruel beaks and eating frost. He suffered silently. The air mimicked his agony. My brain replies: Poor fool, this is your image. Nature is a mirror wherein we see ourselves. The lonely man finds mountains, the shy man valleys: The powerful man loves oaks, the weak man reeds. You make men out of trees, women from flowers, Boys and innocent girls out of simple grasses, Like the Druid who made a damsel out of broom-blossom And flowers of the oak and meadow-sweet gathered in dew. Life is a lasting chaos, the world a wilderness Confounding little orders in devastation." Deny yourself then, or find Him in this black husk, For I can tell you, only if you know. KEN ETHERIDGE. POTWAN In the Potwan mountains God has been silent since the end of time. There are walks and wakefulness of eager embraces and hysteria full of calculation. Eternal largeness or its semblance and the largesse of eternity or its semblance languish- ing in silence. Utterance unuttered replies and replica turned relic placates uncritically round where the lack is spied. Out comes something twisting a handful of terror. Argument snarls; the white eye rolls its red thread upward. Sing Mountains, sing the thirst asleep The birds fall, all, even the one unwatched sparrow and the sky snaps without cooling. Tomorrow, the new day we thought of yesterday, indifferently pregnant with it will give us pumice for scrubbing and a drum. Arrows quiver. The empty quiver and the singing string bemuse us. A long black tunnel for our feeding. If worse come the furrow falls in quickly. J. L. SWEENEY.