"my poetry, from the cauldron it was uttered”—Taliesin, “Preiddeu Annwfn” (“The Spoils of Annwfn”), Wales, sixth century CE
Taliesin may be a remembered dream,
fishing his poems from a hot tureen,
supported by no planking, joist, or beam,
his transcendental cooktop can’t be seen;
but upright apes’ geese are cooked too,
even Napoleon, smart-ass pundits say,
n’a jamais existé, and poor I and you
are feeble fictions who’ll melt away
leaving no tidbits on the tray unless, booked
in some latter-day bardic sort of way,
our happenstance mythology is well cooked
up and in the end somehow turns out OK.
Poets fritter away in forts of frosted glass.
That’s how “iconic” figures come to pass.
--Peter Dreyer
Note: Taliesin’s surviving fragment says enigmatically, “Beyond the Glass Fortress they did not see”; https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/preiddeu-annwn