Tell Me Something Good: Gwion Tells

I had a dream last night about the Welsh cauldron goddess, Cerridwen, and her two sons. It reminded me of this poem I wrote several years ago about the son who became Taliesin, the greatest of the Welsh bards.

Gwion Tells

Cerridwen had a daughter

A beauty from the start

But her son was so ugly

It almost broke her heart

(He wasn’t a bad or evil guy, just so horrible in appearance that only Cerridwen could bear to look at him. After I’d worked there for awhile, I got used to him. It was Cerridwen I was afraid of.)

Cerridwen gathered flowers

She gathered dark and light

She spoke her words of power

To make a brew of might

(Gwion Bach – Official Assistant to Herself, aka cauldron boy. Ok - I was the stirrer. All day. Every day. For a year and a day. Terrified every minute)

Cerridwen filled her cauldron

With water, earth, and sun

She brewed a wisdom potion

To redeem her monstrous son

(The idea was that this potion would give her son all knowledge, all wisdom – enlightenment. I don’t know why someone with her power didn’t just make him better looking, but this was what she came up with.)

Cerridwen’s cauldron simmered

I stirred if faithfully

But the wisdom meant for her son

Was all consumed by me

(Accidentally, of course. I’d been stirring for the year and the day when the nasty stuff spurted up and burned my thumb, I stuck my thumb in my mouth, and well, then I knew everything - seasons, elements, dualities and their resolution, life, death, this world and the next. And I knew that Cerridwen knew.)

Cerridwen knew my habit

I knew I would be found

I changed into a rabbit

She chased me as a hound

(It was great. I thought, “I wish I was a rabbit,” and well, then I was!)

Cerridwen was an otter

When I became a fish

I rose up as a swallow

A hawk was then her wish

(If I hadn’t been so scared I would have stayed a fish. The water was cool and like dense supportive air, only it was, you know – wet. But so beautiful)

Cerridwen was close on me

A fearsome bird of prey

I changed into a grain of wheat

And fell into the hay

(I really think I could have outrun her if I’d been more familiar with my powers. Each one was more astonishing, more amazing than the last. Except for the grain of wheat idea. Its consciousness was so, well plantlike, that it just didn’t occur to me – as a grain of wheat – to be afraid anymore.)

Cerridwen was a chicken

A-scratching in the hay

She swallowed up my wheat grain.

It was the first of May.

(And so there I sat for nine long months. Actually, I kept transforming. From wheat grain to tadpole to a fish again, floating in Cerridwen's ocean. And then a bird, a mammal, and then I was born again – a baby boy!)

Cerridwen meant to kill me

When first she saw my face

But when she looked upon me

She saw my radiant grace

(She just couldn’t do it. She really wasn’t the type to destroy life needlessly. It was just that she had been so angry and disappointed when I had received the dose of blessed enlightenment that was meant to redeem her poor afflicted son. But now I was her son too.)

Cerridwen took a crane skin

And sewed me in it tight

She placed me in the river

At the kiss of morning light

(Well, most people know what happened after that. I floated, just as I was until next May Day Eve and then I got caught in poor Elfin’s weir. When he opened the crane skin coracle and saw me glowing in there he said, “Would you look at the radiant brow on this kid!” Which in Welsh is Taliesin – radiant brow that is - and that was my name ever after. I saved Elfin and his family and became the greatest bard who ever lived. But . . .)

Cerridwen was my mother

I owe her my tongue’s skill

She refined me with her cauldron

She turned me in her mill

Cerridwen was my mother

She gave me second birth

And through her matrix I became

A bard of highest worth

Cerridwen was my mother

Though I feared her at the start

She still resides within me

In my changeless inmost heart.