Listen and you can hear it too
The naked hedges bristling through
The thoughts of another year gone-
Cannot unmake the swallow’s nest
Or uncoil the primal mind to grasp
And endeavour time like the clouds
Frigidly woven through the November hillocks-
And through the valleys, generations laboured
From the immutable inheritance of field,
From the grudging farm made in the image
Of that painful marriage, between God, Man and Death
This is what they toiled for, it was written after all
And so it was true, he insisted, eyeing the rain
Upon the Church slant, like it was a miracle
That Life could not be anything more than this brutal
Simplicity- leaving it with nothing but his sacred duty,
And that everyday contentment to “let things be”-
And listening you could hear it too
Not that Natural silence, intermittingly
Breaking to reform, like the rhythmic waves
Of Cardigan‘s distant cliffs, but another greater silence,
Left in the vacant gaps, of hedges, of nests, of fields,
Of villages and of minds, where all things come to pass
Like the November wind motioning to Winter's coming light.
