Welsh Journals

THE FORGE OF THE SOLSTICE The best are older: with the unrest time brings, No absolute remains to bind them fast. One scrawls on rock the names of hallowed things, Letters and hieroglyphs that yet shall last When darkness measures with a martyr's eye The glories shed by life's unchanging tree. Another, curbing vigour on his page To movement, makes the abounding line his own And rhythmic finds in a discordant age, Singing from living fountains spring from stone, Those unifying harmonies of line Tom from creative nature. Light is bom. Under believing fingers. Men refute By inward protest what their masters teach, Seeking a deeper meaning. One is mute, Fearing far more the heresies of speech Than watchful waiting. Figures move; they pass Across the cave. Before them files heaven s glass, And out of it now falls the winter sun, Leaving a ceaseless myth of moving waves, Till darkness quits all things. Man is one: The identity survives its many graves. First was the hunter, then the prophet; last, The artificer, compounding in one ghost. Hunter and prey, prophet and witness, brought Into that circle where all riddles end. Love gives their art a body in which thought Draws, not from time but wisdom, till it bend The solstice like a bow, and bring time round White with young stars, quick from the forge they have found. Vernon Watkins