Teaching Verse: When the Sky Runs Clear
Chronicle Entry
Recorded by Brother Wyn of Caermynach, Anno Domini 918
Subject: Folk teaching verse
Region: Former Gap region (borderlands of Powys and Brycheiniog)
Period of Origin: Unknown, transmitted orally across generations
In the villages that once formed the Gap, between the old kingdoms of Powys and Brycheiniog, grandmothers still teach their children a verse about the east wind. I first heard it as a boy in Buallt, sung by women who had come from the scattered settlements of the Western Fold. The words stayed with me across the years, a rhyme without context. Only in my later travels did I learn what the verse truly remembers.
The Verse
When the east wind howls, bank your fire low,
Keep the door shut tight, let no stranger through,
Hold your children close and the cattle near,
The black tongue moves when the sky runs clear.
When the east wind howls, speak no name aloud,
The black tongue hears all through the winter cloud,
There's no sacred voice where the shadows hide,
And your soul is caught in the freezing tide.
When the east wind howls, we stand not alone,
Those out in the cold turn to ice and stone,
The wisest lone wolf is the first to fall,
No man stands apart when the black tongue calls.
The verse travels from grandmother to child, always sung on winter nights when the east wind rises. Villages along the hills confirm this practice continues to this day.
What It Remembers
The women who teach the verse say it holds three warnings about standing alone. They speak of what happened in Beulah, when a man thought himself wiser than the community and brought crisis upon his people. They remember Nest ferch Ifor, the healer who worked in isolation until that isolation killed her. They mention Garn Dwad, a village of the Western Fold that stood proudly apart from its neighbours and was destroyed when the east wind truly came.
The eldest women will not explain what the black tongue is, saying only that their grandmothers taught them never to speak of it directly. Younger villagers offer different interpretations. Some say it means cruel gossip that destroys communities during harsh winters. Others claim it refers to something that walks when the east wind blows. All agree that the warning must be heeded.
The phrase "no sacred voice where the shadows hide" troubles Christian believers, suggesting places where even God's protection does not reach. Yet they pass the verse to their children as their mothers and grandmothers did, valuing the survival wisdom it contains above theological concerns.
What Villagers Do
When the east wind rises, families on the side of Epynt still withdraw indoors, bringing livestock closer to settlements and avoiding travel until the wind shifts. The practice continues even though the villages of the Western Fold have changed and scattered since those early days. I witnessed this response during my travels through the region, when an east wind arrived on my third day and every household gathered inside within the hour.
Elders offered different reasons for this caution. One remembered his grandfather's account of people found frozen in their fields after ignoring the warning, while another spoke of sickness that followed east winds. A third simply observed that the old ways persist because survival proves their worth.
The verse encodes practical meteorology alongside its deeper teaching. Banking fires low conserves fuel through long winter nights, while keeping doors shut guards against harsh cold and protecting children and livestock from exposure. East winds in Wales blow from the continent, bringing cold and dryness unlike the milder weather from the west, which supports the warning's physical basis.
Yet the final stanza reveals the verse's central concern. Those who stand apart fall first, while the wisest individual cannot survive alone what a group weathers together. In crisis, isolation kills and community saves.
Final Entry
The verse emerged from remembered catastrophes in the Western Fold. Whether Beulah's crisis, Nest's isolation, Garn Dwad's destruction, or other disasters now forgotten, the women who pass it on preserve hard-won wisdom even as specific events blur across generations.
I cannot determine with certainty what the black tongue represents, and the villagers themselves disagree. What the verse demonstrates through its persistence is that communities survive by standing together when the east wind howls. Generations of grandmothers have passed it on for this reason alone.
Children memorise the words easily, while elderly women speak them with gravity. I have recorded the verse here so it might persist beyond oral tradition. The east wind will come again, and when it does, this wisdom may prove as vital as it has across all the generations that remembered to teach it.
