Seven windows stand on St Michael’s Rock
Windmills turn in the sea
Sheep and shepherd huddle on the hill
Sap drops from the severed tree
Seven windows rise among the swarm of the rooks
The cattle carry the sky
The headland clasps the sea in its arm
The hawk tracks all in her eye
Seven windows flower to Our Lady of Sorrows
Each colour has its own sound
Blue, blue for the robes of the wood
Red for the apple’s wound
Seven windows run the spokes of pity
Wheel of the broken world
Purple the salve for the waste of pain
And the mouths of the fledgling birds
Seven windows hold time’s prism
Still in a silent room
A ladybird sleeps in the Holy Word
The dark jar of the tomb
Seven windows carry the rhythm
Of the time of time itself
The tread of the entering angel
Christ’s heartbeat felt
Seven windows stand on St Michael’s Rock
Windmills turn in the sea
The cut bough’s door bursts green crowns
The seraph towers in the tree
The inspiration for this poem, ‘Seven Windows Stand on St. Michael’s Rock’ arose directly out of my retreats at St Beuno’s. I first started coming to the house in 2014, several months after the death of my husband, the poet, Sebastian Barker. I have continued to go every year since; the house has both brought about and been part of the new life that I have in that time learned to live.
I was, as a poet, of course drawn to St Beuno’s by its associations with Hopkins, and by the ground-breaking poems he wrote there, which redrew the map of British literature. But I also belong to a Jesuit parish in London, St Ignatius, Stamford Hill, and one of my most influential teachers at Oxford was the writer, Peter Hebblethwaite, who had been a Jesuit for many years. So my association with the order goes back fifty years.
Like so many retreatants, I soon made my way to the Rock Chapel, dedicated to Our Lady of Sorrows. Everything about it tells us it is a special place: its situation perched high about the valley, the effort you must make to reach it, the view away to the Great Orme and the wind farm startlingly rising out of the sea, the tiny space inside. But there is more. As I sat, alone, in silence, and, in the first years, grieving, the windows of Claire Mulholland started to speak to me.
She explicitly designed them to move through the different colours of the spectrum as through the different colours of the soul, from deep purple indicating grief, loneliness and loss, through lighter blues to the green of life, the ripening of yellow and the slow burn into the orange and red of transfiguration. All of these colours shift and change according to the weather and the position of the sun as well.
Slowly, as the years passed, this poem, a ballad of time and transformation, took shape. It contains all the elements of her windows as well as what I saw in the landscape around me and the landscapes of prayer I felt within me. The windows and the language became, in time, a pilgrimage of grace. This is what I have tried to convey in this poem.
The poem is published in the sequence, ‘Time at Tremeirchion’, in Compass Light (Renard Press, 2025).
Hilary Davies has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the British Library and is a former Chair of the Poetry Society. She is also a Fellow of the Temenos Academy.