Journey in Ancient Hills

This is a found poem. Found using two index pages from Welsh Folk Lore and Folk Customs by Thomas Gwynn Jones.

Journey in Ancient Hills 

The midwives pour milk and curd into wells,
with molten lead cures.
They bow to the moon,
mumbling magic.
The mountain hag is murdered
by trembling ghosts.

Naked infants, unknown,
with no names,
hear the night howl of dogs
predicting the omen days
of the one-eyed fish,
but no saviour remains.

Lost with my Otherworld lover,
we huddle with ravens
and brindled oxen
against the rain,
protected by trees
at the pre-historic hearth,
making offerings of pins and keys,
awaiting the reformation
and some incorruptible sign
of inseparable souls, at the last

Queen of the Horses

 

In golden silks and brocades I appear,
on a horse so white he gleams in the night,
the horse that pulls the high sun in its course,
is mine, in this fertile land, shedding light.

Pwyll sent his horsemen in pursuit of me.
For two days and nights we ran, while they tired,
my stallion never lengthened his stride.
Pwyll the Prince of Dyfed, a man admired,

came out to hunt me, through the wild lands,
I fled him, ahead of his pleading words.
I delighted in the thrill of the chase
and stopped for the solemn promise I heard.

I had come to this place to possess him
but I am never so easily won.
I rebuked him for the harm to his horse.
To wed the Prince of Dyfed I had come.

My name is Rhiannon, of the horse, the land
and the moon. Queen of the Horses, riding,
mother of the lost one, later returned.
Three mystical birds fly with me, hiding.

I come from that Otherworld, fairer far,
my fathers domain, the deepness of seas,
Find me in the wind that runs in the grass.
I shimmer on waters surface in breeze.

When you stand on the high, ancient, hills
where the wind whips and tugs at your hair,
when you see the breath of a horse on cold air,
beneath and between, I am there.