Good Day, Saint David

The wind munched at my finger ends. The sky hung heavy and hard, like a glut of 1960s architecture. Home can be the only urgency then, and any distance from it is an imposition.

There was no colour - none save the brag of neon, and used packaging speeding airborne. I blinkered my vision and chose the shortest direction.

What summoned me through the castle grounds? Today was not the day for meandering, but this call was as the greeting of a friend long forgotten - warm, yet distant and vulnerable to doubt. I followed, even as the ugliness increased across a densely tenanted car-park.

There a bank of light peeped from beyond the back end of a bus. It seemed superimposed, or electrical at the least. You will have seen this many times, and so have I. Wordsworth already said all there is, and far sweeter than I could. It was not these very blooms that beckoned his pen though, and no words of anyone could vent the joy of each new viewing anyway.

They winter in sere brown, to the eye lacking all seemliness and life, yet chaste and merry bear the tidings and the tides of spring, with more yellowness than fruit, or spice, or freshest yolk would dare, and more nourishment for sight. Gentlewomen, heads low for modesty, yielding polite to each buffet of the wind, then hastening back to duty-stations, soft complexions unblemished even by the stones of hail.

I stood as patron to this glitch in city gloom, this gallery of charm; each work honed by the Artisan. I claimed the national treasure with my eyes - as the dragon, so is the daffodil a badge of Wales, and the symbol of its own patron, Saint David.

What summoned me I know, but know not how - perhaps a memory of other winters brought to other welcome ends by simple yellow blooms, in that very car-park.

Sumangali Morhall March 2006 ...Read the work of Wordsworth on Poetseers.org

Saint David of Wales