Down+the+M4

=**The Poem:**=

Me! dutiful son going bak to South Wales, this time afraid to hear my mother's new. Too often, now, her friends are disrobed, and my aunts and uncles, toot, go into the hole, one by one. The beautiful face of my mother is in its ninth decade.

Each visit she tells me the monotonous story of clocks. 'Oh dear,' I say, or 'how funny,' till I feel my hair turning grey for I've heard that perishable one two hundred times before - like the rugby 'amateurs' with golden sovereigns in their socks.

The the Tawe ran fluent and trout-coloures oer stones stonier, more genuine; then Annabella, my mother's mother, spoke Welsh with such an accent the village said, 'Tell the truth, fach, you're no Jewess. They're from the Bible. You're from Patagonia!'

I'm driving down the M4 again under brigdes that leap over me, then shrink in my side mirror. Ystalyfera is farther than smoke and God further than all distance known. I whistle no hymn but an old Yiddish tune my mother knows. It won't keep.