Author: Dafydd Hughes Lewis

Alien

by Dafydd Hughes Lewis, posted in Journeys in Time

I arrived with the select few hundred –
we chosen ones privileged to make the landing
after our craft had traversed the vast
illimitable distances of interstellar space.
We arrived under cover of darkness;
but the pitch black of this new world’s night
meant nothing to our elaborately-constructed eyes.
Silently we scattered across the terrain,
our goal to mingle with the Earthlings,
to become totally accepted by those humanoids,
to ingratiate ourselves among this inferior species,
to go out, then, and multiply until we became millions;
until we would gradually become their masters,
and the planet, their whole world, would be
subservient to our will.

Over millennia we carried out our plan,
infiltrating the homes and cities of countless cultures,
becoming, before the fools knew it, in total,
absolute control. Superior; exalted; sacrosanct.
They pandered to us, worshipped us, did our every bidding;
and always we were there to willingly accept and glory in
the utterness of their obeisance.
In certain of their kingdoms we became
revered as holy; totems to them; inviolate,
their paragons – their gods. Yes, gods we were
and gods shall evermore remain.

And when the hour comes when I must finally depart
my last allotted life – for we are programmed
for a ninefold term upon the approach of death
to revitalise, to resurrect, to replicate,
I will go imperiously before him whom
our human slaves mistakenly refer to as their ‘God’,
and I will let it be known, and quick indeed had he better be
to comprehend my meaning – that he is sitting in my chair.
For I am Cat.

From ‘Journeys in Time’

Triad (Inexplicably missing from the Myvyrian Collection)

by Dafydd Hughes Lewis, posted in Of Poetry and Song

And these are the Three Capital Cities of the nation of the Cymry:

Caerdydd, being merely the hyped-up administrative capital; Tyddewi, being simply the miniscule ecclesiastical capital; and Llanelli, being by Divine Right and the unanimous and irrevocable Will of all the gods that be (and a pox descend upon whomsoever saith otherwise) forever and ever the illustrious, uncontested Rugby Capital.

From ‘Of Poetry and Song’

The Big Comeuppance at the Border

by Dafydd Hughes Lewis, posted in Memories, Moods, Reflections

(A Battle of Truly Biblical Proportions) 

Come one step closer, Dai Bach cried,
and I’ll plant this pebble between your eyes!
Goli Mawr roared with laughter and lumbered on;
Dai wrapped the pebble up in a thong.
With a whish and a whoosh it sailed through the air.
Goli Mawr didn’t notice, so intent was his stare
on miniscule Dai, five-foot bugger-all,
from up in the crow’s nest, nine feet tall.
The stone stopped him dead. Wel Duw, Duw! Nefi Bliw!
(not one in his army rushed up to queue …)
Dai’s army let out a rugby-pitch yell
as – golly! – the oversized Englishman fell.

From ‘Memories, Moods, Reflections’

Seamus, Who Came to Live Among Us

by Dafydd Hughes Lewis, posted in Welsh Past and Present

(for Seamus Kelegnan, 189-? – 1932 )

We buried him in a quiet corner of the churchyard,
under the shadow of the trees, not far
from the lichened Ogham stone.
His bearers were all young farming lads,
friends with whom he’d gather at the Fisherman’s
once or twice, or thrice, a week to talk of how things were
with them, and sing.
The Reverend had good words for him, which,
with all the crowded years gone by
I cannot fully now recall –  
how, although he had come among us as a stranger,
his kindliness of spirit had endeared him to us all;
how, although he had never forsaken
nor even been known to have professed –
a guessed Catholicism,
he had each Sunday been as faithful to Saint Eirion’s little llan
as he might have been to Brigid’s.

Slowly, inch by inch, they lowered him at last
it seemed an age – into the ground.
And when the first shovelful of earth had clashed upon the oaken box
I closed my hands about my face,
for it was as though the sound of it had echoed far and wide,
up to the people in the distant whitewashed farms
high upon the patchwork slopes of sheer-faced Carn Edeyrn,
among the workers toiling in the further far-off fields,
and to the fishers in their bobbing boats out in the bay –
and that it burst upon the air, for them,
like a mighty clap of thunder,
and they would stop in their worldly tasks
and look up at the cloud-hung sky and say:
“Oh, they are casting the earth upon the grave
of poor young Seamus Kelegnan today’.

Back home, I took a last look at his room,
and at the little he’d possessed.
His working clothes, his box of tools, small change
placed neatly in a pile. No photographs. No mail.
He had never, either, spoken of his age; I think perhaps
he had not exactly known of that himself.
Nothing there to show who he had been, nor from
what place he’d come; and so
no family with whom we could communicate
the tidings of his passing –
if any kin remained to him across that restless sea.

From ‘Welsh Past and Present’

Conversion:

by Dafydd Hughes Lewis, posted in Of Gods and Men

The Epitome of Religious Experience

It came,
that lofty pinnacle
in time,
that instant of rapture
undefined,
when all the weight of flesh
and every fear
fell off from him
as chains fall
from the oppressed,
and an angel is born within;
when all the host of the opposed
– of those unblessed –
could offer no more argument;
when all uncertainties
were banned,
and peace inhabited the soul.
He stood alone
to make this solemn testament –
to reach the Promised Land,
to see that glorious blinding light
as Saul had seen,
to be baptized
amid this great, great silence
on all sides.
Immersed now
in the bliss of the divine…
his eyes uplifted to the sun.

The kick went
straight between the sticks.
The crowd went wild.
The ref blew time;
and Wales had won.

From ‘Of Gods and Men’

Autumn Story

by Dafydd Hughes Lewis, posted in Of Goddesses and Women

Here, beneath the autumn sky
I wonder where your beauty lies;
in your eyes or in your hair,
or in your slender body, where
your elven contours vie with ease
the fairy lacework of the leaves.
Their topaz, copper or rubine
eclipse not lakes of tourmaline
that are your eyes – and fair
indeed, beyond compare,
the leaf of gold to match your hair.

From ‘Of Goddesses and Women’

The Small Stone Mill

by Dafydd Hughes Lewis, posted in Journeys in Time

(Ireland, in the Year of Our Lord 1649) 

The sun was low when we entered the village.
The small stone mill still stood, I saw,
the gurgling rush of the stream still turning
its wooden wheel, and that still turning the mill-stones in the dark within.
The forward rushing of the stream,
the low, dull rumble of the turning stones;
no other sound.
But when we left there came to us the gentle rustling
of corn shifting in the evening breeze,
and the stirring of small birds
up in the trees, as though all was well… that
nothing had happened here.
That all the small thatched homes had not been burned
down to the ground, and smoke arising from them still;
that there were no torn men and women and little ones
lying in their blood upon the grass;
that the little church was not a blackened, empty shell;
that the friar in his bloodied frock of black and white
was not swinging, slowly swinging, from the lintel of its door.
And all the while, the unheeding water
gurgled beneath the wheel, and the wheel turned.
There was the quiet rustle of the corn,
and the stirring of the birds up in the branches,
and from within that small stone mill
the rough rumble, the grinding of the stones, turning,
turning on their own, with no man tending them.

From ‘Journeys in Time’

Passages Omitted from the ‘Catalogue of Heroes’ in Culhwch ac Olwen, being the Seventh Tale of the Mabinogion

by Dafydd Hughes Lewis, posted in Of Poetry and Song

And forthwith did Culhwch invoke his boon in the name of three mighty men of the nation of the Cymry:

Shane Yscafndroed, whose mission it was to carry a coated pig’s bladder through the flanks, and yea, even the massed ranks of an opposing host (and so fleet of foot was he, and jinking and weaving withal, that no single one of that host could touch him, but were strewn as laid corn round about the path which was his god-given choice to wend.)

Adam Gwallthir, whose mighty bulk could stand steadfast against the onslaught of eight of the doughtiest men of all the hosts of Lloegr, and of Alban, and of Ireland, and of the Kingdom of the Franks, and of Rome, and even those of the far-flung regions at the south part of the world. (So great of strength was he and fearsome to behold that the spirit of those eight who came in fury against him would wane, and their endurance wither, whereat they would collapse unto naught before him.)

Leigh Hanerceiniog, who would neither bow his back nor strike an attitude of prayer before performing his duty, but would stand upright and stalwart like unto a true son of the Cymry (and even were two tall sticks placed the width of one half-pence piece apart and at a distance of an hundred and three-score paces, he would find his mark.)

From ‘Of Poetry and Song’