TRAETH LLANDWYN
At the water’s gentle edge – that can be
storm-driven, flinging sand, seaweed, pebbles,
eroding the dunes, uprooting the seaward
margins of the forest of planted pines
in whose deepest reaches ravens roost –
my granddaughter stands facing the sea,
as she has most summers of her nine years.
In one of the glades of the manmade forest
sibilant with the bay and an off-shore breeze –
along the landward edge of the beach –
someone has hung a length of blue climbing rope
from the one of the tallest trees. Today
she has found it, and arcs above pine cones,
kidney vetch, marram grass, over grains
of sand, subdued, shifting.
John Williams
September 3, 2022Thank you, David. It’s a touching poem that takes the reader back to Ted Hughes’ ‘Relic’, except for the word ‘gentle’. The forest gets plenty treatment – ‘planted pines’, ‘man-made’, ‘hung …with climbing rope’, ‘the tallest trees’, ‘…arcs above pine cones’, as well a lots about the ‘vetch, grass, grains of sand’. I wonder what happens to the ravens in the poem after that superbly worked line (the most striking), ‘in whose deepest reaches ravens roost –’? The line not only draws one’s eye to the birds’ physical presence, but also to a creature at home in the natural world. How far does the image extend? The ravens might also carry an ethical value, they’re nearer heaven. All this is in contrast to the child, earth-bound, whose skyward leap is by a blue rope. Perhaps this interpretation goes too far. After all, the price of an image is eternal vigilance. Thank you.
David Selzer
September 6, 2022Ravens do roost in this man-made forest so I had not thought about their potential symbolic significance until now. Perhaps they may represent death, knowledge?