This is Gorffwysfa, a place of rest,
This is where her recovery began
Amharic text reminds us,
As we live beneath the sun,
She was an old Welsh witch,
When sky was black as gold,
Dragged across a sunless sea
By men without a soul:
Her stories and narrations,
Her lives as yet untold,
Lost in that stinking slave ship’s hold.

From the slave ships, and the factories,
From the valleys and the hills,
We heard the triumph of the wizened men:
Men who could not just be still,
Men who’d never seen the sun;
Nor wonders could behold.

Gobeen men, these counters,
These misers of the heart,
Their fractured souls’ inheritance
Was to live their lives apart
From this Abyssinian maid
Who they swore was in her grave.

Such long and false forgetting,
Of moones and seas and sunne,
Is lifted by the light of night:
To the heart, where her songs begun:
Of damsels rare and golden
Who sing beneath brother sun.
As Coleridge once foretold,
Her journey had begun….