I heard your eyes were blue before we met.

Yes, blue, the village whispered, right and wrong.

Blue was their righteous sibilant refrain –

Insistent yet inaudible to me.

They never saw that dazed obsidian orb,

Effulgent, swell within its sapphire womb

Involuntary black as Rhondda coal

Dark as the day that hides behind the moon.

They never saw those clean white lucent lids

Sweep over Celtic secrets, swift as swans,

And drop, as azure nightfall drops from light,

Into the ancient tribal sleep of Wales.

What gazed into our instant newfound land,

As clear as life illumined at its death,

Uncoloured in its cavernous desire,

Was never born of spectrum bound by sight.

Not arctic stars in Prussian midnight seas,

Nor cobalt clouds, nor living peacock things,

Nor slate of memory; berries, birds or flowers,

Nor indigo December, dark with rime.

But yes - those eyes are blue - I give them that:

The blue of bruises; blood stopped in the veins.

The blue that buries music in the throat.

That breathless, baby blue of unborn song.

And when I kissed the back of your worn neck

(satin like babies; leather like bold men)

In Builth, before the judges and the sheep,

You closed your eyes in pleasure and in pain.

I learned then, and can never unlearn, why

That muted wool rich scent of you arose,

And why they whisper “blue” to strangers; but

When will you breathe, my troubadour, my Wales?

When will you (will you? will you? when?) be born?