Place of recovery
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,
She was dragged across a sunless sea
By men without a soul:
Her stories and narrations,
Her lives as yet untold
Lost in the stinking slave ship’s hold.
From the slave ships and from the factories,
From the valleys and hills,
We heard the triumph of the wizened men:
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 moons and seas and sunne,
Is lifted by the light of night:
In the heart, where songs begun,
Of damsels rare and golden
Who sing beneath the sun.
As Coleridge, so-long ago, foretold.
Her journey had begun....