A Merlin in the Sheeffrys
There is a feeling that is equal to the land,
a sense of self that is the journey’s length.
It changes, bright to dark, and back again,
in moments such as when a hill decides
to vanish, prompting the sea to appear,
sun-thatched, sun-pregnant, sun-remonstrating,
before another bog-dividing mile
leads down to a stretch where abundant rock,
as if by words, or acts, elicits calm.
And then, in a mood of three mountains, you drive on,
the land’s equal by free and strange degrees,
one for whom a merlin sighting proves a way
to push the day to absolute kinship.
The merlin declares: ‘I have brought you here.’
To which madness the Sheeffry winds reply:
‘Talk to the dead as you would to the living.
Address the living as if they were the dead.’