Dawn On Kilvey Hill Poem by Jim Young

Down there,
rolling under a blanket of mist,
turns my village, Pentrechwyth.
Snoozing on this Sunday-chapelled morn.

Up here,
a skylark, thrilling in a cut-glass sky,
singularly teases, "look here, I'm here! "
Spot the dot in the up and up,
trilling way on up from its nested home,
a dot at the thinnest edge of a whole blue day.

Swansea bay arcs cool and clear,
the tide always going out or coming in,
the hushed docks rumbling to the Mumbles train.
At my feet Port Tennant and Danygraig
drink in the breakfast sun gently fingering
the gravestones in the cemetery of night,
where rust-aged memorials are pointing heavenward,
up to this nether hill of mine.

Weeps a church bell.

The rocks are warming,
between the old windmill and the farm.
Sit there with the ages and look back
out across the sea, or
across the Tennant bog,
afloat the moat of Llandarcy.

Time stops. The bell stops sobbing.
There's a haze over Jersey Marine.

Or lie deep in the dry wine grass,
white below the wakening whisper,
sinking into the land, embracing,
inhaling the morning - so pristine.

The village is tossing and turning in the mist,
that is sliding down the Tawe quickening.

A train cough, coughs.

The cottages stir bleary eyed, and
divest of nightgowns, and slate nightcaps,
turn their stone countenances to warm in the morning sun.
Kettles mist the running scullery panes,
as Sunday scratches a morning yawn.

Down from dawn by the sedge marshes,
the virgin streams turn from the black slag stones,
and the sulphurous testament of an industry dead.
With the morning locked in my heart I turn
into the village where the church and chapel
pour out their dusty parishioners
with their books of common prayer.
But there is not one. Not one!
Who has tasted the aperitif of dawn,
for my Sunday lunch upon this Sunday morn.