Poem:Watchkeeper by Nerys Williams

Watchkeeper

for Gwilym Williams

Pixels break a thousand spaces where floating faces rise. Sun clambers over hills to a black cross. That shines your eyes back into it, breathing in villages, towns, cities mourning cemented onto walls. Plumed objects placed in corners looking back at us. Your poems tell me how you loved these lanes: Primroses, brambles, lichen, moss, birches thickening. Walking to school, a prison to a small boy with dirty knees you chewed a pencil until teeth touched lead. Then something flecked its ambition: An inscape mediated the inscribed hymn of fire, hearth, light. Patterns on water unlocked a spell of belonging homing into books. The heart’s machine tells us there is more than this. But if we can, we return wrestling with nostalgia. The hurt of humanity, its exoskelelton branding the world, stammering untold prayers. Yet you, I, we, they, believe in something more: Pan welaf athrofa y werin yn uno fy nghenedl i gyd. Something that exceeds self makes space for thought–beyond the hardware that litters our sky. And in a village a woman tells a child: On his return he could not walk into the kitchen. He asked for paraffin to douse the lice that covered his body. Under a willow he stripped before he could be touched.

Nerys Williams Commissioned by Literature Wales and funded by the Welsh Government for the 2019 Holy Glimmers of Goodbyes event

2017

The Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) was undoubtedly one of the most devastating engagements of the First World War and for Wales there was the symbolic loss of the iconic poet Hedd Wyn on the first day of fighting. In 2017, a major commemorative service at the site of the Welsh War Memorial in Langemark, Flanders marked the centenary. In Wales, Yr Ysgwrn, Hedd Wyn’s home, opened to the public following a major redevelopment programme. Throughout 2017, literature was a key feature of commemoration, with events held in partnership with Ireland and Flanders.

Right: Yr Ysgwrn, a Grade II* listed building built in 1830 © Purcell UK.