Ashes Copyright © Owen Robin Davies 2011

A car drove by the barn the other day;
quietly, and parked secretly by the dell
where the woods begin, now in their autumn glow,
just by the place where ringing cowslips dwell.

I asked their business here where no one usually strays.
Three people is a crowd in this wood,
and they looked accomplished in reverent sorts of ways.
"The man who was born in that house has died,
we've just scattered his ashes here in this copse."
A field then, when he was a mitching boy
wild amongst the oxslips and the bee orchids.

The house they point to over my shoulder is mine,
shared now with this man who lies where he used to lay
eighty years ago, dreaming in the flora of his youth.
In the field above the wood my dogs play
their lives away, living in a factor of seven.
And but a hurried heartbeat away of a colossal time
I see a man and woman enter his field below, lovers,
surrounded by a veil of summer pollen, entwined,
fertile in the hot August sun.
She in her thin, blue summer dress,
he white and strong in labourer's linen shirt.
Led by her on an ancestral journey
to the ashes of their son who lies there now.

I walk by today, my feet rustling in the leaves and see,
My own belonging, enhanced by his presence.
I, a newcomer, he a generation giant
driven by the heedless memory of his youth
striding over the years, reaching out to me.