Alan Llwyd
The Bull of Bryncelyn
The geese goosestepping in terror; their hissing peevish from the sedges,
the hens scattering from the yard
helter-skelter like scraps of paper; his clomping from Riffli
resounding in the ears of the bitch, she too, like the hens, by now
crouching from fear of him behind the hay shed,
her heart thumping her ribs, and her blood pounding like a hammer.
They were fleeing from the bull of Bryncelyn
who was tugged on a tether, to be brought to the timid heifer:
a slobbering bull, the treacle trickling from his beard
a rope on his jaw as he struggled, his lustreless pelt
pitch-black, black as the darkest darkness,
the gnats lost in the folds of his double-chin's pillows;
the ring twisting through his nose, and his hooves, in crushing
and ripping up grass, leaving the meadow pockmarked,
while he groaned, grumbled, his breath like mist around him,
as though he were hauling the whole earth like a plough behind him.
His sound in approaching like the sound of troops marching together,
he's a clumsy drunken cohort, a woozy boozy company,
the armour of the months of coldness tight around him,
and the ding of the dung metallic, as if he were a battalion,
two horns like bayonets charging,
and his tail like a lash whipping his legion before it.
He nuzzled the heifer in ropes
of drivel, licking
and lipping her crotch, then hauled himself up to come to grips
with her flesh, snorting noisily in his lust,
the white heifer bending like a fern beneath a ton
of flesh, and the thrustings
of his flesh pressing her lower still:
the bull unsatisfied like a tractor revolving in place,
and the heifer's legs tottering as though the dome
above, in the heavens, had descended upon her,
the whole weight of the universe on flesh, and the flesh weakening,
and the labouring staving in the back,
her backbone on the brink of breaking before the clumsy rapist
freed her from his grip on completing the devilish ritual.
After the nine months,
the womb where he spilled his seed
ripe for birth, and the heifer
moaning in her labour
uttering a gutteral lowing, as the flood, the dam opening,
pushed her first-born in his blood forth from her womb:
a limp calf with his legs wobbling like wheels underneath him,
his wet coat glistening.
And he'd be the fierce beast's heir as his posterity increased.
Welsh; trans. Joseph P. Clancy
Alan Llwyd, Welsh, trans. Joseph P. Clancy.