A very beautiful poem by GILLIAN CLARKE (known as the Welsh poet laureate) who has become one of the best-loved and most widely read writers of Wales. Gillian was born in Cardiff in 1937 and has lived in Wales most of her life.

 

MUSICIAN

      (for Owain)

 

His carpet splattered like a Jackson Pollock

with clothes, books, instruments, the NME,

he strummed all day, read Beethoven sonatas.

He could hear it, he said, 'like words.'

 

That bitterest winter, he took up the piano, obsessed,

playing Bartok in the early hours. Snow fell,

veil after veil till we lost the car in the drive.

I slept under two duvets and my grandmother's fur,

and woke, suffocating, in the luminous nights

to hear the Hungarian Dances across moonlit snow.

The street cut off, immaculate the house

glacial, suburbs hushed in wafery witeness.

At dawn, hearing Debussy, I'd find him,

hands in fingerless gloves against the cold,

overcoat on. He hadn't been to bed.

 

Snows banked the doors, rose to the sills,

silted the attic, drew veils across the windows.

Scent, sound, colour, detritus lay buried.

I dreamed the house vaulted and pillared with snow,

a drowned cathedral, waiting for the thaw,

and woke to hear the piano's muffled bells,

a first pianissimo slip of snow from the roof.

 

(GILLIAN CLARKE  Colected poems published by Carcanet p.143) 

 

 

                                                         .............

 

ADVENT 1955

BY SIR JOHN BETJEMAN

 

The Advent wind begins to stir

With sea-like sounds in our Scotch fir,

It's dark at breakfast, dark at tea,

And in between we only see

Clouds hurrying across the sky

And rain-wet roads the wind blows dry

And branches bending to the gale

Against great skies all silver pale

The world seems travelling into space,

And travelling at a faster pace

Than in the leisured summer weather

When we and it sit out together,

For now we feel the world spin round

On some momentous jouney bound -

Journey to what? to whom? to where?

The advent bells call out 'Prepare,

Your world is journeying to the birth

Of God made Man for us on earth.'

 

And how, in fact, we do prepare

The great day that waits us there -

For the twenty-fifth day of December,

The birth of Christ? For some it means

An interchange of hunting scenes

On coloured cards, And I remember

Last year I sent out twenty yards,

Laid end to end, of Christmas cards

To people that I scarcely know -

They'd sent a card to me, and so

I had to send one back. Oh dear!

Is this a form of Christmas cheer?

Or is it, which is less surprising,

My pride gone in for advertising?

The only cards that really count

Are that extremely small amount

From real friends who keep in touch

And are not rich but love us much

Some ways indeed are very odd

By which we hail the birth of God.

 

We raise the price of things in shops.

We give plain boxes fancy tops

And lines which traders cannot sell

Thus parcell'd go extremely well

We dole out bribes we call a present

To those to whom we must be pleasant

For business reasons. Our defence is

These bribes are charged against expenses

And bring relief in Income Tax

Enough of these unworthy cracks!

'The time draws near the birth of Christ'.

A present that cannot be priced

Given two thousand years ago

Yet if God had not given so

He still would be a distant stranger

An not the Baby in the manager.

 

------------------------------------

 

THE WAY MY MOTHER SPEAKS

 

I say her phrases to myself

in my head

or under the shallows of my breath,

restful shapes moving.

 

The day and ever. The day and ever.

 

The train this slow evening

goes down England

browsing for the right sky,

too blue swapped for a cool grey.

For miles I have been saying

 

What like is it

the way I say things when I think

Nothing is silent. Nothing is silent.

 

 What like is it.

Only tonight

I am happy and sad

like a child

who stood at the end of summer

and dipped a net

in a green, erotic pone. The day

and ever. The day and ever.

 

I am homesick, free, in love

with the way my mother speaks. 

 

(CAROL ANN DUFFY Select Poems

 Penguin Books, p.88)