Free Island of Lightning by Robert Minhinnick

what existed before it was built, the voices under the ground: the shiggling lamps, the blackpats.
    Soon, life before the supermarket will be an inconceivable past. And then, when it is sufficiently strange, when it is irrecoverable, we will make films about it and statues will be raised and historians will give judgement and the rest of us will shrug and think there but for the grace of God goes... but Lady Bute at the checkout is asking if I need cashback. Look, pilgrim, here’s a miracle indeed. I’m leaving with fifty more than when I came in. Happy dog.
    Immediately I stand in a predicament of roads. The straightest route is around Taff’s Well and north on the minor road between ash trees whose black buds have yet to unfurl and more of those shirtbuttons rolling in the grass.
    This week I met the poet, Landeg White, who left Taff’s Well aged five and has not returned. Until now. I am reading his book, Traveller’s Palm , which reeks of his time in Africa, of its maize porridge and prison cells, and of his Portuguese home with its carafes of green wine. No-one in Taff’s Well remembers Landeg White. No-one in Wales remembers him. The poet made the mistake of becoming exotic. But now the son has returned. Ah well, I shrug, and turn aside from the road.
    Instead I retreat towards The Garth. Up, over, and here is Efail Isaf and not a soul to be seen in the village. In a garden I watch a sparrowhawk alight. It seizes a young blackbird. Soon around the hawk is a circle of feathers. Outside that circle is a circle of silence where nothing can intrude. Outside that second circle is a circle of uncertain silence. And outside that circle is the grief of the cock bird’s voice. It approaches the hawk as closely as it dares. But the two circles of silence are forbidden to it. It watches as its chick is torn apart and devoured. Then the hawk rises and takes a second bird. Looking around the lawn, it makes the killing with its spur, calm at the centre of the circles where the rite is performed. Soon there are two circles of feathers, each with two circles of silence around them. The world is forbidden to enter those circles. The blackbird is forbidden and I know I am forbidden. No creature, no magic or sacrifice can alter the power of those circles. They were drawn before we discovered the purpose of our minds.
    When the hawk flies off the circles disappear and soon there’s cuckoo spit on my legs and the pennants of lords-and-ladies beginning to thrust aside the litter, snake berries we used to call them, and here’s a field full of milkmaids close to white-painted St. Illtud’s at Upper Church Village and you might look a long time for milkmaids in the dictionaries and come away disappointed, but this is my childhood around me, smoking out of the dew, pollen poltergeists moving ahead and behind, and I can put a face and a name to every one of those ghosts, for these are my traveller’s palms and at this instant it seems impossible to believe that anything lost will not eventually be returned.
    Footsore, I’m in the lanes. There’s a whirlpool of trails around here. I know a better way, said the thin man, but we’re going west when I know east of Mynydd y Glyn is called for. There are S bends and empty road signs and if this is the way to Pontypridd it is the route I would take in a post-apocalpyse Wales when all former identities have vanished and there’s no right and no wrong.
    Here at a crossroads is another hollow sign, and tied to barbed wire is a cellophane bouquet. Someone must have died in this place. Somebody lost or travelling too fast, eager to leave this country that has no name. What should be happening now is our descent into Graig, dangerous for pedestrians, and our triumphant arrival in Taff Street.
    But I travel with a companion who thinks he knows a better way and soon there’s a notice on a wall that confirms my suspicions. ‘Pant y Brad’ it