Welsh Journals

Llewelyn's Spoon SLEEP; the strange light has not Yet reached your cot, Nor undone your fingers' knot, No years' light slid to call your eyes awake; Your lids are shut: you play with a green snake. A life above twined arms Where winds' alarms Await dumb nacre's doomsday charms Whose Triton trumpets resurrect the sea, For this coiled shell to give them liberty. Who shall undo the winds In your shut hands Where hides the dropped bud of all minds In ivory locked, of Chinese intricacy, First breath, dividing air and land and sea? If seas could wind a thread, A sage might read In the fair silence of your head A broken grief from which all prints are drawn, Where the words break and decorate new dawn. But in those eyes, where wild Tears form a child, Desires divorced and reconciled Sleep where the stars' annunciations meet, And the world's wrongs are rustling at your feet. May contradictory joy Sustain you, boy, Against the spectre's dwarf envoy, Like love's frail wool closing your warm life now, Fresh as rough fields where hands have gone to sow We by your nothing made Mute and afraid, So little yet so perfect laid, Stand, where all thoughts are gathered on a guess Of mystery and suspended happiness.