From the terrace of the Jesuit college,
high above the Vale of Clwyd, the poet,
Gerard Manley Hopkins, searching, longing
for his faith, sees a kestrel on the thermals:
‘I caught this morning morning’s minion…
My heart in hiding Stirred for the bird.’
In the distance are the mountains and the sea;
over the vale Denbigh’s castle ruins;
north, at the river’s mouth, Rhyl – fishing village…
become seaside resort…become ghost town…
A mile or so south along the ridge
where Hopkins stood, and a few years after
he had left the seminary, caves –
formed hundreds of millions of years ago,
on the northernmost edge of the Ice Age world –
were uncovered: with bones of mammoths,
woolly rhinos, hyenas, and stone age tools,
evidence of millennia of human life,
Neanderthal then Homo Sapiens.
Hunting in the forests that filled the vale,
a natural spring below the caves, and shelter
from the weathers and to keep fires alight
made this as good as castle keep or town
Did their hearts rise, like the poet-priest’s,
watching the hawks, and grieve for the creatures
hiding in the ferns? Did they study the clouds
over the sea and the mountains, as he did
each morning on that terrace, searching for words
for things beyond themselves?
By David Selzer