Ar ben y bryn
Sits a paint-brush-thin monument,
A crooked rocky record built by unwilling hands.
This cockeyed testimony announces a difficult man,
A man befriended by nature
Whose oakish form turned in opposition to his kin
To take root on stony ground,
To prosper on infertile soil
And shelter under nature's canopy.
Y bryn oedd ei gartref
And there he thrived
To the annoyance of the conformists,
The chapel-goers, the gossipers, the rate-payers,
Those who could not abide his ragged clothing,
Sweat-stewed, blood-patched remnants of cloth
Hanging rags of garments and barely-there shoes.
Loneliness was his hope and so peace was his.
Ar y bryn fu farw.
A few feigned to mourn to satisfy their curiousity
Hoping to spy the corpse of the man on the hill,
A man who was and who wasn't one of them.
And so a dissonance rang through the town:
He was them but not them,
Miserably poor but enviably free,
And so, his half-hearted monument was raised
On a foundation of contempt and begrudging admiration.
Revised