After Rilke’s First Duino Elegy

‘In Annwn below the earth…
There is one who knows
what sadness
is better than joy’
The Hostile Confederacy

Who, if I cried out, would hear me
in the depths of Annwn? Its spirits
have wings yet are not Rilke’s angels.
I am all alone in my dark sobbing.
My hands are clasped. How to pray
when told prayer has little worth?
How to fling out this heartfelt cry
on the unclipped wings of a bird,
throughout Prydain make it heard
and in Annwn below the earth?

Voices, voices, whisper in my ears.
I, unsaintly, do not know how to hear.
How to listen as saints have heard
to voices of spirits derided as devils,
denied, defied on summits of hills,
chthonic shrines now unhallowed?
How to respond to spirits of Annwn
cast out with their unangelic terror?
Deep below, so very deep below
there is one who knows.

Oh what does he know?
Speak, please, not of sorrow,
the hardness of being dead and those
who move between the dead and living,
who died violently and could not rest,
wandered lost to their madness
until he called them home.
Speak instead of the glow
of his mead hall, the gladness
of his poetry, not what sadness

lies within his soul of many souls.
It’s said he contains the fury of the devils
of Annwn within him – an eternal current
sweeping through all the ages,
both worlds. Swept along
only knowing him when we die,
we have lost so much and are so lost.
How to pray to him in his immensity?
Fling out my cry knowing his reply
will be better than joy?