John Ormond, Welsh Poet, Speaks

(to one of Welsh ancestry)

By Dawn Baker Brimley

Third Place, 1980 Poetry Contest

Today I feel I meet you once again;

Your words emerge like Stonehenge from a vast

and unremembered moment on a plain

like Salisbury, or nearer, in my own past.

Your mind in solstice moves beyond your days,

old, as is Wales, perplexing in its lure.

By very fact of being it denies

the death of deathless Owen of Glendwyr.

And when you speak, my father looks at me,

small and Welsh and he agnostic too,

but full of light as sunrise sky can be,

and deathless, even while he died,

as all the living, pulsing past I see in you.