They followed their stolen water for miles, the Birmingham

Welsh.  Why not?  It swelled Rough Road’s square tumulus

to which it had flowed 86 miles without being pumped,

through tunnels and pipes from the mountains of mid-Wales

the plaque said, and so should flow from their taps too, from Huw’s

and Glyn’s in Endhill, whose Dad carved lovespoons for hiraeth,

as from our own. And it is a little Wales I increasingly

reflect on through the years’ glassed depths, the pain-

ful, jewelled beauty of a carboy garden, chalk-dusted desks,

endlessly handwritten mmms, broad beans in damp jam-jars, root-

hairs preternaturally distinct, as if engraved. I over-

look it all, now, the crown of Bandywood Crescent—beeches,

wheeling rooks, a vertigo of clouds—and Kingsland Juniors,

fathoms clear in a crystalline drowned valley, as clear

as their escape from mine and furnace with the fervour

impressed on our soft inland minds, thrown into relief

by exile. Mrs Scott, thick-lipped, throaty-sybilline, invokes

her father’s hen-coops in Merthyr; Mr Thomas, grinning

through his wife’s childlessness, his cowlick falling, his plimsol

for what we called a pump half-heartedly falling, unlike

dark-jowled, beastly Mr Williams’s expert welting

action (his beer-and-Woodbines breath a bardic tenor

hoarse across stud-stamped wastes). Is that his string vest, or

an elaborate, blurring retrospect? How, at this distance, any-

way to see the hymn-book bound in green, sing a green hill

so distant it is black, below which three boys sat on the play-

ground wall, witnesses recalled, before the tremor minutes

after morning prayers; as we were opening desks and books

together, monitors still at their tasks, milk from the gate tremb-

ling in steel crates to classes ignorant of the pulsing well-

spring of the tip; our big clock also oozing towards nine-

seventeen, hands telling time’s gravity, a hill waters move

that should move from a hill unbearable as love, reservoirs

filled like our heads with hurt bent in dark rows next day, salt

tears we shed learnt from them also, or do I imagine all of this?