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Jefferey Wheatley

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Welsh Easter

A time of small events - my lady at 4 a.m.
letting the dog out in a storm, she standing
at the door, hearing the roar of the sea,
cold, feeling a bit like Grace Darling;

then after, when I was the one who could
not sleep, her request that the radio be
turned down, I breakfasting to an oratorio
by Johann Sebastian B.

She was right, of course, he ought to be
turned right down, displaced as he is by
hundreds of miles and years, and a man
with small experience of the sea.

Later, on a cliff path, ‘Is your dog safe?’
one asked me, fearful to move, admitting
a touch of vertigo. I explained that mine
was a foolish dog, like most others,

meaning no harm: fact rather than reassurance.
Looking out, it was not the complex
mathematics of the sea that pressed,
but the grey expanse of it; the difference

between artifact and the natural order.
Admiration for the strict form of an older
tradition could be the link with Bach - that
or the rough structure of the striped rocks.

Or just his name. The sun was bright, that
night it snowed: the Easter enigma in all
small events - the anachronism of a baroque
record; hearing the rock struck, feeling it shake.

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