Scrawmy, gray-souled November

blinds the whale-road, pall draper

over this ship bearing one

whose name means of the ocean

in a language he denied

allegiance to, though his lines

rang with cynghanedd—English

reined in by Celtic music,

stitched tight as the oracle

that wombed Taliesin—tribal

rain-downs of sound, not enough:

a small people lose their tongue

one poet at a time. Talentsquanderer,

fraud, miscreant,

apt sobriquets for a life

lived badly between the lines.

The coast recedes. Last gulls cry.

Down in the hold his drunk wife

smokes and flirts with the seamen

who play cards on his coffin.