The Open Door

Heilyn opens the door to end the sojourn on Gwales; The Birds of Rhiannon fly.
Illustration by Margaret Jones
 

~*~

When the door is opened,

when Rhiannon’s birds still their song

and the head of Brân is silent,

who will speak to us as we pass

the door that can never again be closed

in our Time?

“Shame on my beard” said Heilyn

“If I do not open it” - 

The door that Manawydan counselled

Should not be opened , for he knew

The pain that would fall upon him,

The grief of many deaths

And his world changed beyond enduring.

For now a blackbird sings in a garden enclosed,

fills the bare boughs of a tree with strident beauty.

It is enough. Buds will break. The tree will bear green leaves.

Other doors will open. 

On a Welsh Beach

M.C.Escher (Wikiart)

‘... dyuot tri ederyn, a dechreu canu udunt ryw gerd’

“... three birds came and began to sing a song to them, and all the songs they had ever heard before were unpleasing compared to that song. They had to look far out over the waves to see them but they were so clearly present to them as if they were with them.”

                               §

                     Birds of Rhiannon singing, where sea meets sky,

                     A shifting border at the merging of worlds

                     Their littoral music like the tides on the shore

                     Ebbing and flowing onto the land, into the air;

                     Cloudscapes of sound, now drifting, now clear

                     Like the horse she rides: now here, now there;

                     The boundaries of time, of place, don’t cohere

                     On the island of Gwalës on the sea, in the air.

                      The company holds in a vision somewhere,

                      A blissful communion, a binding of hearts,

                      Until a hand reaches out to open the door

                      And the song melts away in a breaking wave

                      So the land and the sea and the sky

                      Take their place in the world once more.

                                       §

“When they looked through the door all the losses they had ever suffered fell upon them ..... as if they were waiting to meet them.”

Quotations from the Second Branch of the Mabinogi. The company returning from Ireland with the head of Brân spend eighty years on the Island of Gwalës, though when they return they are no older and no time has passed in the world they left to go to the island.