Where willow stoops in curling shallows, May
stirs branches that creak like rigging or rub
like silk. The cuckoo sings its unsettling,
solemn roundelay. Sun gilds the abbey’s
west wall. The glassless rose window is a
blinded eye in a Romanesque skull –
indulgence in a wilderness. The Blood of
the Lamb coursed through the old ways of Keltoi,
Celtae, Celts. Time the dissembler leaches
the earth of language, artefact, intent.
A wall in the south transept was scorched by mishap
or mayhem. Dousing the flames, did the monks
break their vow? The Reformation empowered
even Trappists. Rulers destroy or endow
for glory. Defenders of parliament
effaced the cross (placed on a pagan mound)
carved to honour the Princes of Powys.
Even at the world’s furthest edge, even
beside an unkempt road through a valley,
was always a junction of opposites –
the classic, classical dichotomies
of the cerebellum and the soul, of
carapace and substance, tyranny and
learning. An oak tree, shaped like a brain, spins
the sun’s threads and is cleft, halved – fire and leaf.
By David Selzer