Heledd 2025

The Canu Heledd, ‘Songs of Helled’, are a sequence of over a hundred short verses – epigrammatic three-line poems of the kind called englynion in Welsh, one of the oldest forms of Welsh poetic composition. They date from (probably) the tenth century, but they imagine events from some three centuries earlier, in an age of border warfare: the main speaker, Heledd, laments the death of her brother Cynddylan, ruler of a small border territory somewhere near Shrewsbury, at the hands of marauding warbands. Repetitive, compressed, unrelieved, they are among the unchallenged masterpieces of medieval Welsh verse.

Their evocation of the human cost of violence is intensely contemporary. In these versions of the opening sections, I have removed the local names and relaxed the historical specifics a little. The ‘grey-headed eagles’ of the original lose their precise outline to suggest other kinds of predation (such as drones); the laments for ‘Tref Wen’, literally the ‘white’ or ‘shining’ or ‘blessed’ town, become laments for what was once simply a ‘good place to live’. The unyieldingly bleak repetitions in the verses of the first section are allowed to collapse and tentatively re-form. Without taking them totally out of their home territory, not much is needed to hear these verses in women’s voices from Sudan, Gaza, or Ukraine.

Tonight my brother’s home is dark.
The fires are out, Nowhere to lie down.
               I shall stop crying soon, I promise.

Tonight my brother’s home is dark.
The fires are out. The lights are off for good.
               God stop me going mad. Nothing else will.

Tonight my brother’s home is dark.
The fires are out. The lamps are shattered.
               Grief rears up where the walls have fallen down.

Tonight my brother’s roof is the black sky.
The glow of company has died.
               Sorrow walks in with nothing good to give.

Tonight my brother’s home dissolves,
its guardian buried. When he was alive
               there were no broken locks.

Tonight my brother’s home
          no-one to love it any more
now that he isn’t there

          so what I want to ask you, death, is
what’s the point, leaving me alive, because
tonight there is no comfort, only a bare cliff

               Of wreckage rearing up, there is no
householder, no household, the fires are out, so is the family
the tears are cutting channels in my face

the fires are out the water floods to my feet
the roof has gone.

                    I am alive he is not

you know once they were respectful gentle
the jewellery has all gone you know they showed
respect to the women who made

The meals for them kept the fire God
what shall I do
the roof is the black sky the fires are out

So that when I think of the room
crowded for festivals around the fire
my brother’s home is a shot to the heart

                               *

Tonight the grey predator circles,
sharp little yelps signal overhead, greedy for meat,
for the flesh I loved.

Tonight the grey predator circles,
the signals overhead go through me, greedy
to search out my brother’s flesh.

Tonight the grey predator circles,
sharp little claws out overhead, greedy
for the flesh I love.

Tonight you can hear the grey predator
across the distance, waiting
for soldiers’ blood.

The name of this town is desolate, the name
of this town is dead.

                               *

The good place to live, on a hillside with trees,
its destiny was always this,
blood smearing the face of the grass plots.

The good place to live, nestled into its neighbourhood,
its destiny always these memories of greenness,
while the menfolk’s feet slither on blood.

The good place to live, tucked between slopes,
where the kites gloat over the chaos
and humans do not live here any more.

The good place to live, where the shattered equipment
left from the fighting has become more everyday
than livestock taking their nap at noon.

The good place to live, where blood
smearing the face of the grass plots has become more everyday
than ploughing fallow earth for next year’s food.

                               *

From up here, all I can see
is unfarmed land.
The sun has a long journey. My memories are longer.