Silence, even in the edge of the suburb. There’s a big town nearby, but R S Thomas comes back to me again, the silent village. “This last outpost of time past”.
I am as far from Lleyn as I could be in space and form but not maybe in mood. Here the once busy local streets (never called streets here – too urban a word – but no shortage of houses), are silent as of the tarmac were no more than one “that leads nowhere and fails at the top”.
I wander in my mind back to those little places, scarcely villages, which the poet wandered amongst, away from any road, where I automatically, without thinking switched to speaking in Welsh, before realising that I don’t actually speak Welsh enough to complete a coherent sentence, but there is no other way to speak of the bracken-clad hillsides wandering down in their own time to the cliff and the inevitable sea.
There are houses here, and neighbours, and the way between the one tavern and the one shop, both shuttered, but stillness in the way.
So little happens; the black dog
Cracking his fleas in the hot sun
Is history. Yet the girl who crosses
From door to door moves to a scale
Beyond the bland day’s two dimensions.
Take me back to Lleyn and its embracing sea.
See also
Books
- R S Thomas:
- A Llŷn Anthology (ed. Dewi Roberts)
- A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
