Welsh Journals

I know this mighty theatre, my footsole knows it tor mine I am nearer the rising pewit's call than the shiver of her own wing. I ascend in the loud waves' thunder, I am under the last of the nine. In a hundred dramatic shapes I perish, in the last I live and sing. All that I see with my sea-changed eyes is a vision too great for the brain The luminous country of auk and eagle rocks and shivers to earth. In the hunter's quarry this landscape dies my vision restores it again. These stones are prayers every boulder is hung on a breath's miraculous birth. Gorse breaks on the steep cliff-side, clings earth, in patches blackened for sheep, For grazing fired now the fair weather comes to the ravens' pinnacled knoll. Larks break heaven from the thyme-breathing turf; far underlying through sleep, Their black fins cutting the rainbow surf, the porpoises follow the shoal. They are gone where the river runs out, there where the breakers divide The lacework of Three Cliffs Bay in a music of two seas A heron flaps where the sandbank holds a dyke to the twofold tide A wave-encircled isthmus of sound which the white bird-parliament flees. Rhinoceros, bear and reindeer haunt the crawling glaciers of age Beheld in the eye of the rock, where a javelin'd arm held stiff, Withdrawn from the vision of flying colours, reveals, like script on a page, The unpassing moment's arrested glory, a life locked fast in the cliff. Now let the great rock turn. I am safe with an ear of corn A repository of light once plucked, from all men hidden away I have passed through a million changes. In a butterfly coracle borne My faith surmounting the Titan, I greet the prodigious bay. I celebrate you, marvellous forms. But first I must cut the wood, Exactly measure the strings, to make manifest what shall be. All Earth being weighed by an ear of corn, all heaven by a drop of blood, How shall I loosen this music to the listening, eavesdropping sea ? Vernon Watkins. AN INKLEMAKER OF UVVERTON Without let or hindrance the merest stranger may apply his magnifying glass to the face of Gower: cottage and castle, mound and megalith, footpaths, fossils and flora-all may be peered at recorded, kodachromatically immortalised, or just enjoyed. There is one feature of Gower life, however, that must remain largely terra