Welsh Journals

of stone, and all his family were in on this job. The stone carried on your back from the quarry to the shore, piled in a ridge roughly a boat's length, marked by a long rod with a rag flag to fly above the tide. The boat was beached alongside and the stone thrown by hand aboard. As the tide ebbed, the team took their stand in the water often up to their waist and heaved 'un up, and the women so good as the men at it. If ever there was time or occasion for a cottage woman to go to Swansea, she'd get everything ready, and listen, as she worked. Time she heard the horse-bells she'd dress, and wait on the road for them. Pack saddles they was and each horse had a bell, and everyone would join up for company and safety, for alone would sure be robbed and they all walking, very jolly it was. Coming home she might get a lift, if so be one of the packs was empty. Phoebe Simons. TALIESIN IN GOWER Late I return, 0 violent, colossal, reverberant, eavesdropping sea. My country is here. I am foal and violet. Hawthorn breaks from my hands. I watch the inquisitive cormorant pry from the praying rock of Pwlldu, Then skim to the gulls' white colony, to Oxwich's cockle-strewn sands. I have seen the curlew's triangular print, I know every inch of his way. I have gone through the door of the foundered ship, I have slept in the winch of the cave With pine-log and unicorn-spiral shell secreting the colours of day I have been taught the script of the stones, and I know the tongue of the wave. I witness here in a vision the landscape to which I was born, Three smouldering bushes of willow, like trees of fire, and the course Of the river under the stones of death, carrying the ear of corn Withdrawn from the moon-dead chaos of rocks overlooking its secret force. I see, a marvel in Winter's marshes, the iris break from its sheath And the dripping branch in the ache of sunrise frost and shadow redeem With wonder of patient, living leaf, while Winter, season of death, Rebukes the sun, and grinds out men's groans, in the force of its underground stream. Yet now my task is to weigh the rocks on the level wings of a bird, To relate these undulations of time to a kestrel's motionless poise. I speak, and the soft-running hour-glass answers the core of the rock is a third Landscape survives, and these holy creatures proclaim their regenerate joys.