Welsh Journals

Sonnet: Innocent Sleep LABOURS are vanity unless they close In wonder. Sleep. When winds dispel the stains Of dead leaves, every sepulchre remains Innocent as a mountain. Hark Wind blows. Frost bites the window-glass with whirling snows. Now misers count their losses and their gains But he whose loss defied all weather-vanes Sinks in the ecstasy of what he sows. We move towards origin. What we prepare Awaits the annunciation of the seed. Out of our uttermost, darkening thoughts we breed What we love most, what is a gift indeed Of hands to our dead selves, falling from air, Sudden as acorns, secret as a reed. VERNON WATKINS. Trearddur Bay TODAY as thick as mud-pack The winter waves Flow like wet mortar up the beach, As though the world were but a wall And Time, the mason, Plastering every breach. But on a summer's day, Stone's throw away, I've seen the self-same glassy sea Fair as a perfect anadyomene, Break from her spell-bound sleep Between the rocky hummocks, she the lazy-fingered polydipsiac sea, Shaking her cocktails languidly. CHARLES DAVIES.