Poem for Today

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Evening - our back yard
    This is a poem by a late friend of ours from the old Gerlan Bohemia days of the Eighties. A fine time, remembered well by all that can actually remember anything of that time. Those of us still surviving are much redu-ced (archaic phrasing made popular with us by John Martyn) in our social capacity - more so in our present, virally-controlled micro-societies, but we trundle on - as normally as we can - into an uncertain future. This poem is from a sequence entitled 'Penmon'. My intention nearly forty years ago was to produce an exhibition of photographs to reflect the ten pieces that form the cycle. Somehow, it never happened, and Ian [Hughes] the author, died some years ago. I feel of a mind to maybe, finally get the job done after all this is over. Anyway, this is the poem:

VIII. PRAYER

praying, we are together
connected by words

poems learnt by heart,
our prayers give their meaning
beyond the words: together
our words mediate
between our separate meanings
and the Meaning

except when the sudden phrase
arrests the demissive mind
like particular cadences
that stay when the sense
of the song is lost

or the shadow of a gull
divides the light
from the east window

or the ice inheres
from the north winter wind,
garbling the words
and freezing their meanings

or it may be a spider
stopped without purpose
on the back of my hand

but these are unfamiliar
and occasional instances,
disjointed elements
in a separate chant:
words without language

Ian Hughes, Penmon - from Poetry Wales, Summer 1979, Volume 15 No.1

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