Gillian Clarke

Miracle on St. David’s Day

[All you need to know about this poem is that it is a true story. It happened in the '70s, and it took me years to find a way to write the poem.] 

‘They flash upon that inward eye 
which is the bliss of solitude' 
(from ‘The Daffodils' by William Wordsworth) 

An afternoon yellow and open-mouthed 
with daffodils. The sun treads the path 
among cedars and enormous oaks. 
It might be a country house, guests strolling, 
the rumps of gardeners between nursery shrubs. 

I am reading poetry to the insane. 
An old woman, interrupting, offers 
as many buckets of coal as I need. 
A beautiful chestnut-haired boy listens 
entirely absorbed. A schizophrenic 

on a good day, they tell me later. 
In a cage of first March sun a woman 
sits not listening, not feeling. 
In her neat clothes the woman is absent. 
A big, mild man is tenderly led 

to his chair. He has never spoken. 
His labourer's hands on his knees, he rocks 
gently to the rhythms of the poems. 
I read to their presences, absences, 
to the big, dumb labouring man as he rocks. 

He is suddenly standing, silently, 
huge and mild, but I feel afraid. Like slow 
movement of spring water or the first bird 
of the year in the breaking darkness, 
the labourer's voice recites ‘The Daffodils'. 

The nurses are frozen, alert; the patients 
seem to listen. He is hoarse but word-perfect. 
Outside the daffodils are still as wax, 
a thousand, ten thousand, their syllables 
unspoken, their creams and yellows still. 

Forty years ago, in a Valleys school, 
the class recited poetry by rote. 
Since the dumbness of misery fell 
he has remembered there was a music 
of speech and that once he had something to say. 

When he's done, before the applause, we observe 
the flowers' silence. A thrush sings 
and the daffodils are flame.

--Gillian Clarke