I dreamed a gallop across sand
in and out the scallop of the tide
on a colourless horse as cold as a seal.
My hair and the mane of the horse
are the long white manes of the sea.
Every breath is a gulp of salt.
Now we are ocean. His hoof-prints
are pools, his quivering skin
the silk in the trough of the wave.
His muscular ellipses are
the sinuous long water of the sea
and I swim with the waves in my arms.
by Gillian Clarke
from New Poems
Flies, like black thoughts, have not quit me all day…
A. N. Apukhtin (1840 – 93)
I’ve grown weary of sleeplessness, dreams.
Locks of hair hang over my eyes:
I would like, with the poison of rhymes,
to drug thoughts I cannot abide.
I would like to unravel these knots…
Or is the whole thing a mistake?
In late autumn the flies are such pests –
their cold wings so horribly sticky.
Fly-thoughts crawl about, as in dreams,
they cover the paper in black…
Oh, how dead, and how dreadful they seem…
Tear them up, burn them up – quick!
by Иннокентий Фёдорович Анненский (Innokenty Fyodorovich Annensky)
(1904)
translated by Boris Dralyuk
It was the time of the election.
The ravens loitered above the hill
In slow circles; they had all air
To themselves. No eyes heard
Them exulting, recalling their long
History, presidents of the battles
of flesh, the sly connoisseurs
Of carrion; desultory flags
Of darkness, saddening the sky
At Catraeth and further back,
When two, who should have been friends,
Contended in the innocent light
For the woman in her downpour of hair.
by R. S. Thomas
from Pietà (1966)
Fun Fact: The poem refers to the Battle of Catraeth and the medieval Welsh poem Y Gododdin.
The road unwinding under our wheels
New in the headlamps like a roll of foil.
The rain is a recorder writing tunes
In telegraph wires, kerbs and cats’ eyes,
Reflections and the lights of little towns.
He turns his head to look at me.
“Why are you quiet?” Shiny road rhythm,
Rain rhythm, beat of the windscreen wipers,
I push my knee against his in the warmth
And the car thrusts the dark and rain away.
The child sleeps, and I reflect, as I breathe
His brown hair, and watch the apple they gave him
Held in his hot hands, that a tree must ache
With the sweet weight of the round rosy fruit,
As I with Dylan’s head, nodding on its stalk.
by Gillian Clarke
from The Sundial, Gwasg Gomer, 1978)
Cars pass him by; he’ll never own one.
Men won’t believe in him for this.
Let them come into the hills
And meet him wandering a road,
Fenced with rain, as I have now;
The wind feathering his hair;
The sky’s ruins, gutted with fire
Of the late sun, smouldering still.
Nothing is his, neither the land
Nor the land’s flocks. Hired to live
On hills too lonely, sharing his hearth
With cats and hens, he has lost all
Property but the grey ice
Of a face splintered by life’s stone.
by R. S. Thomas
from Tares (1961)
Rambling At The Bridge Head 
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