A knife placed in a baby's fist

                                         by Waldo Williams

What is Man?

What is living? The broad hall found

between narrow walls.

What is acknowledging” Finding the one root

under the branches' tangle.

What is believing? Watching at home

till the time arrives for welcome.

What is forgiving? Pushing your way through thorns

to stand alongside your old enemy.

What is singing? The ancient gifted breath

drawn in creating.

What is labour but making songs

from the wood and the wheat?

What is it to govern kingdoms? A skill

still crawling on all fours.

And arming kingdoms? A knife placed

in a baby's fist.

What is it to be a people? A gift

lodged in the heart's deep folds.

What is love of country? Keeping house

among a cloud of witnesses.

What is the world to the wealthy and strong? A wheel,

Turning and turning.

What is the world to earth's little ones? A cradle,

rocking and rocking.

Young Girl

That was what the stone carcass once was, a girl;

each time I see these bones, she takes hold of me again,

and back I go to her haunts, with every year of mine

answering for a century of hers.

She lived among people who knew what peace was,

buying their goods from the earth and the earth's gifts,

wondering silently at birth, marriage and death, tending

the human kindred's bonds.

All too soon she was put away, in her eternal foetus-crouch:

twelve times she greeted the arrival of May, and then

began to keep company with the darkness that took her, her voice

no longer heard on the hill.

So that the wide sky became deeper on account of her,

the blue sky brighter on account of her, and

the unseen ageless house above the hill's peaks more firmly founded

on account of her.

A child's skeleton in the Avebury museum, from around 2,500 BC.

From Rowan Williams, The Other Mountain.