Travelers Welcome

Travelers Welcome

Thursday, August 18, 2011

BEFORE NEUTRAL TIME

by Byron Beynon

Not an old man,
but a face worked
on by life and those
late evenings when he'd speculate
the bars with his friends
to drink a favourite share.
His voice recalled
when on one dark-
coated night,
the biting stars
pierced the skin,
I saw him
brought into the swaggering
light of a public house,
two men held him
by the arms, he paused
for breath, and sang
in Welsh a verse or two
in remembered pitch.
After the applause and dizzy
glass, he was gone,
the strong impulse to move on
before neutral time
called on him.

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