To Bryn Cader Faner
On a fine, shallow day – a day of larks,
of aeroplane trails vivid as the cropmarks
that surrender ancient plots and fields –
the path across the moor is clear and dry,
and as the hills rise, so the path
lifts into unrestricted light.
But here, and here, along its side:
way-markers three thousand years old.
Each nods silently toward the next.
The reeds and bog grass quickly dim,
the river’s silver in an instant slims,
and when the cloud descends
there is no white-dashed road below,
no hotels muscled to the estuary wall;
there never have been.
Whoever dug the earth out
to receive these stones, whoever tipped
and fixed them in position,
knew the ease with which
we become lost – and not in the sense
of metaphor, not in the sense
of spirit, mind or heart, but here:
within the fog, upon the moor,
along the same high path.
(First published in issue 49:3-4 of Agenda as ‘The High Path’)