Celfypridd

Out on the mountain watching the rain move in

From the Severn Channel thinking I was caught

Walking boggy ground on the old Miskin Estate

But I stood still watching as the rain grey shroud

Passing me by covered the dim domed lower hills

I found myself listening out there to the wind blow

Soughing its sighs through the conifer plantation

Blasted and flattened by a New Year gale that felled

The woodlands on the hill tops and frosted high slopes

So that in the morning it looked as if a battle or war

had broken out while we slept off  the New Year party

It was a scene of desolation walking through forests

Like some Paul Nash painting of shattered Ypres trees

Fifteen years later the trees have still not recovered

The walls of the estate built to enclose common land

Have fallen too and are now used in places to make paths

Where the land is wet and poached by cattle hooves

But although these long dry stone walls have tumbled

We have different kinds of walls built to close us in

This relentless psychologised industrial consumerism

That inflicts its message on the first day of a child’s birth

You need, you want and you can’t ever get enough.

Supplication