An Egret at Portmeirion
over 3 years in The Irish Times
after the conference
Evening silence and the crowds are gone leaving a quiet hour, two alone watching a lonely egret on the shore, recalling all we share, art, life, and more, designs and dreams, ideas, harmonies, buildings, beauty, culture, histories.
At the edge of things the sea’s retreat, the come and go of water, salt and sweet, draws the Dwyrid’s tides in waterlight the way a word, lines drawn on paper might house us, unite us, Europeans all, one force against the rise and fall of fools,
who clamour, cackle, crow. They come, they go, less than an egret’s feather on the flow.
Gillian Clarke was National Poet of Wales 2008-2016. Recent publications include Selected Poems (Picador, 2016); Zoolog (Carcanet, 2017); her version of the seventh-century Welsh poem Y Gododdin (Faber, 2021); and a prose collection, Roots Home (Carcanet, 2021)
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