The Voyage of Edwr
The days of feasting and hunting seemed unending:
The seasons passed: the hart in the woods bred
And reared its young year on year,
We ran after them, the spear sang a song
of whistling death. We joyed.
We painted on the walls, drank mead,
The feast-hall lit by dancing flame on flame
Chewed the meat, swallowed, wiped gravy off our lips
And threw the dry-sucked bones on the midden.
Until we thought that it would never end.
One day, the heavens fell. Or so it seemed
Edwr announced that he would sail the waves.
We reeled, amazed. Days passed
But so it proved. Edwr would sail the waves
For fish, he said, for treasure, and because
There were other men, perhaps with the heads of dogs
Out there, over horizons
Trees were felled, then hewn,
Tied together, thews and thongs,
Caulked and tarred,
And hollowed logs and masts and sails
Made of unbleached cambric.
And all the while,
The skald sang “Edwr will walk upon the waves
With the Gods”, but no one believed it
We all thought this was folly.
No man can challenge the Gods,
Invading their territory.
The sea growled and grumbled meanwhile
Threshed and thrashed its protest,
Throwing stones and seaweed up the beach
Men laboured sweating until, one day
The vessel lay ready.
Edwr chose his companions:
They accepted their fate like martyrs
Touched by a holy wounding.
Bleak was the day
We watched them become a speck in the distance
With the wind singing alas, alas.
Weeks passed, then one day a shout from the shore
The ship returned, shorn and shattered
And up the shingle they stumbled,
Barely making sense. The skald sang
“Edwr has returned, the Gods are happy”
But we could all see something was wrong.
Edwr was not himself, even
When he returned, full of stories:
The fog where you could not see
The whirlpools, monsters and kraakens,.
The black, the rime-cold sea
The unseen rocks, jagged like the teeth of wolves
Encircling, encircling…
The watchman – they had to lash him to the mast
And even then, he slept, frost stinging his eyes.
He was, but was not, Edwr.
His eyes wide and crazed
Not heeding the skald,
Even when he had shorn his hair,
And washed the salt out of his beard
He still scanned the horizon,
As if expecting something
He said the world has no edge,
And maybe there are no Gods after all
Maybe there are no Gods
After all.
M.C. Newberry
Sun 30th Aug 2015 13:58
Like a tale told around the flickering flames of a long-ago campfire, this holds and feeds the imagination to the end.
It is easy to imagine such a time when men lived in fear
and foreboding, of upsetting "the gods" and falling off the
edge of their world. It serves to remind us of the courage
of those who, in reality, set off to find what was beyond
their own limited horizons in centuries past and set Mankind
on its way to the Moon and, eventually, the stars beyond.