MAM CYMRU

The purple, jagged rocks on the island’s shore

were molten lava from volcanoes –

mere craters for aeons now – across the straits,

and limestone boulders in the hinterland

the slow detritus of the last ice age.

RAF Typhoons have flown from their air base,

ten miles or so from here, every day,

leaving the island with their stormy thunder,

over the mountainous Llyn Peninsula

out into the north east Atlantic,

as if it were quite another sea.

This island was Mam Cymru, the granary

of Wales. Its ubiquitous, redundant mills

are unmarked monuments to a past

bountiful, precarious, and brutal.