POETRY

THE SWELLIES, AFON MENAI, ST VALENTINE’S DAY

Lovers are as mariners, navigators

in crowded, intricate sea lanes of

momentary loathing and lasting passion.

Pilots guided vessels into the straits:

from the north, between Trwyn-du’s dark rocks

and the wicked sands of Dutchman Bank;

from the south, between Abermenai

and Fort Belan over the Caernavon Bar;

and then through The Swellies – Pwll Ceris,

‘Pool of Love’ – where the surging high tides whirl

round Ynys Gored Goch, the wild waves

tawny and their foam white as drifting snow.

Lovers are as sailors in insane storms

and intimate calms, ever watchful

for icebergs and mutinies, heading always

to the Hesperides, course set forever

westwards into the sun.

 

 

 

THE MEMORIES OF SLAVES

On Overton Hill, an obelisk

in local sandstone marks the parish war dead.

Fresh graffiti partly obscure Worrall,

Egerton, Massey – names of Cheshire gentry,

villages, labourers. There is a solace

in landscapes, remorseless historians.

Below the hill, the town becomes a toy.

To the horizon, are laid out the pricey,

strategic illusions: refineries

distilling forests and the wide, poisoned

river narrowing to an ashen,

urban haze of broken streets, redundant wharves,

the memories of slaves.

 

 

 

POETIC JUSTICE

A wishful thinking editor re-spelt

my name with a T and changed a poem’s

final words from ‘a tramp woman nurses

an infant/under a tumbling sky’ to

‘under a trembling sky’. Humbling to find

an editor’s chance(?) choice of epithet

happier than mine own! Mine was truer.

One winter night, I was changing trains at Crewe

and a red faced fellow traveller

sang, “…not her beauty alone. ‘Twas the truth

in her eye made me love the Rose of Tralee”.

His pale wife shivered by their cardboard case.

His breath condensed like the whitest of roses.

 

 

 

DINAS BRÂN, LLANGOLLEN

'Castell Dinas Bran', Richard Wilson, circa 1771



The path zigzags upwards to the keep, like

smoke or a hare hounded. Magpies lowfly

the gorse, bank to a clump of pine, barks pink

as coral. Ravens wheel. Birds and the wind

disdain the ruins peasants carted, raised,

razed and thieved. Before allegiances, walls

was this hill, that vast, limestone precipice

and, everywhere, silent, ancient waters.

Whoever sees the turf worn with walkers’

traffic and earth’s crust shining, whoever

looks across the vanished sea to the cliff’s

myriad catacombs will imagine the hoe

snick in the furrow, the clangour of arms

and the chough’s triumphant croak.

Defenders,  tousled on the battlements,

watched fields sown, leaves fall, expected Saxons.

Foes were covert. A viaduct terminates

the valley and trim, mechanical

dynasties converge on the smoky plain.

The journey from Powys to the Five Towns

was all of sixteen leagues, as ravens fly,

a thousand years and such optimism.

 

 

 

AFON MENAI

Immemorially, at the ebb tide’s turn,

they pull for the bank, moor, wade, cast and wait.

(Terns flock, screeching). They haul the full net

to the edge of the sand. Kneeling, they pluck out

the shrimps, prawns, crawfish and return the rest.

The water slowly rises about them.