An Egret at Portmeirion

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.

Barbed Wire University and The Island of Extraordinary Captives

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YA fiction: Posing the questions that continue to haunt us as adults

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Border poll could unleash ‘Troubles scenario’, says Belfast writer Rosemary Jenkinson

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Remembering my great-aunt Eliza, killed in Weaver Street bombing 100 years ago today

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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)