wordsout by Godfrey Rust                                     BREAKING THE CHAINS ← 48 of 61 →  The place where socks go  ←→  HOME

Aberdaron

We may suppose he has been here. There is
evidence: this bay, this headland,

the clouds' endless commentary
as if to say See what was done

with one word, and so many millennia.
We must suppose it. Nothing 

else will free the hung jury of our reason,
like a child in a game 

counting to ten, to a hundred, a thousand—
Ready or not, here I come! Silence 

and the shadow of a gull's wing on the water,
the slow breaking of the sea.

Aberdaron is the village at the tip of the Lleyn Peninsula in North Wales where the poet R S Thomas was at one time the Anglican priest. Tessa and I spent a week's holiday there in 1985.

© Godfrey Rust, godfrey@wordsout.co.uk. See here for details of permissions for use.