A flourish of flowers self-seeded
in the shade of an old wall,
nourished on nothing but stone,
dirt, detritus, winter’s tears.
From a mulch of dead things
comes a rush of stems,
heart-shaped leaves, Earth’s love-gift,
the opulent purples of April,
to keep in the dark when it’s over
a purse of seed translucent as bees’ wings,
as pages of old books,
as the silver eyes of your lover.
You show me the way it is, to lose, to keep
the light of your life in the lens of a line,
syllables of grief, the world
more luminous seen through tears.
Bluebells
Which came first? Scent or heartburst of blues?
Cerulean, indigo, sky, a breath of rain,
sunlight between stems of sessile oaks
before the wood breaks leaf, when trees first feel
a quickening in their roots – the shift and stir
of bulbs swelling beneath the earth.
The ink-blue dark of an icy night of stars,
last snow gone from the shadowed side of a wood:
Porthkerry, Fforest, Allt Blaen Cwrt.
Or long ago when folds of a satin dance-dress
fell about me like a drench of water
when I hid in her dark wardrobe from their storms.
Or the sweet still blues of La Parisienne’s gown,
in one of those still hours in the gallery,
and I a child alone in a room of treasure.
After the bitter cold it comes again,
this dream of blue breaking in the wood
in a long flood about the ankles of oaks,
the drowning satins of cool blue in a wardrobe,
beauty and grief and every blue in the world
in each drooping head of bells.
La Parisienne: the painting by Renoir in the Welsh National Museum and National Museum of Art, Cardiff
Between the Pages
for John Pikoulis
A long-ago Saturday,
tyres spinning the light
and the wind in our hair.
Two cycling to nowhere,
lost in the lanes between
Penarth and somewhere.
We stopped by a stone church,
dropped in cool grass, wheels
milling gold as they slowed,
drank from our cupped hands
from the tap by the door
for the tenders of graves.
And this is for you, John,
man of letters, of lives:
inside, in the watery shadows,
I climbed the pulpit with a fistful
of primroses, opened the Bible,
its pages cold as a wave,
pressed my flowers in its depths.
I was twelve, the page 248.
Glâs
A little rill of rainwater off the fields
is plucking its harp strings in the sun,
and a ditch among reeds is a rising gleam,
the miracle of water’s give and yield.
Two mingling colours of glâs in a stream,
and I’m dreaming that secret web of water
underfoot, down through the storeyed strata
in Earth’s unmappable corridors of stone.
While along the road the whistling water-gods,
sons of Coventina, goddess of springs and wells,
are burying miles of piping like a map
of life, an arterial stream to every tap,
like those rivers, reservoirs, aquifers underground,
invisible silvers silent as ultrasound.
glâs: blue or green
Small Blue Butterfly
Six years old, with my father, waving to sailors
in the heat of a long ago summer, leaping the rails
as a big ship docked, steadied and slowly rose
on the rolling tide when the sea-gates closed.
Dizzy with tar, salt, coal, the river
lost in the throat of the Severn, and just here, a quiver
above the muscular mud, the colour of sky
over the Bay, a small blue butterfly.
I think of its frail flight over shifting silts
as I climb the steps, slate firm underfoot,
like climbing the centuries, leaving the lift and lilt
of opposing currents a long way out.
After eight hundred years adrift,
and all the years of my life on the way to this,
I claim this house as my own,
climbing the steps, coming home.
this house: Y Senedd, the Welsh Assembly building
Mango
Paring the mango tonight, my knife so sharp
I took off the skin in a single ringlet, green
with a flush of rose – and I half remembered
boarding a white ship, grown-up talk of war.
Only this stays – me in my father’s arms,
carried aboard a big ship in the docks,
my mother behind us pretty in blue,
my father’s friend, the Captain, at the rail.
Down in the cabin they laid me to sleep
on a bed that rocked. The sea looked in
through the window. Then it was dark.
There were secrets. The Captain’s eyes were kind.
He gave me a fruit like a cold green stone so big
it overflowed my two hands cupped together.
They cut the top, and I sucked it, drank it, juice
running down my chin, my fingers, my dress.
It wasn’t like plums, blackberries, our worm-hearted apples.
It was like a fruit in a book sucked by a boy
in a faraway land you could only reach on a ship
sailed over a huge blue ocean. Only this remains –
the taste and the rocking sea, the fruit like a stone
with a stone inside like the keel of a little ship,
storm-rocked with grown-up whispers, my globe spinning,
the load in the hold and our hearts heavy, shifting.
Senedd
Mountains spent time on it:
the slow settlement of silts,
mudstones metamorphosed to slate,
prehistory pressed in its pages.
Rock blown from the quarry face
and slabbed for a plinth, a floor,
a flight of stairs rising
straight from the sea.
The forest dreamed it:
parable or parabola.
Look up into the gills of fungi,
the throat of a lily.
A man imagined it:
the oak roof’s geometry
fluid and ribbed as the tides
in their flux and flow.
He cools us with roof-pools of rain
that flicker with light twice reflected,
a wind-tower of steel to swallow our words
and exchange them for airs off the Bay.
Inside the house of light at the sea’s rim
you can still hear the forest breathe,
feel the mountain shift underfoot,
hear sands sift in the glass.
The Tree
after Red Cuts by David Nash
for Oriel Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno
The architect’s vision, a space in the mind
before a line was drawn or walls imagined,
is a poem before sound, before words,
before the sea-lit ceilings shadowed by birds,
bare concrete printed with the memory
of trees grown with a forest’s slow geometry.
Workmen tapped things home with a final touch,
tuning the building to its perfect pitch.
Builders with art on their arms are done,
whistling brickies, carpenters, masons gone.
The tree, old yew, placed at the heart of the gallery,
glorious, broken, bloody, ablaze, a glare
of flame alive in its dance of death,
art’s sign, and metaphor, and shibboleth.
Blue Sky Thinking
April 2010
Let’s do this again, ground the planes for a while
and leave the runways to the racing hare,
the evening sky to Venus and a moon
so new it’s hardly there.
Miss the deal, the meeting, the wedding in Brazil.
Leave the shadowless Atlantic to the whale,
its song the only sound sounding the deep
except the ocean swaying on its stem.
Let swarms of jets at quiet airports sleep.
The sky’s not been this clean since I was born.
Nothing’s overhead but pure blue silence
and skylarks spiralling into infinite space,
a pair of red kites flaunting in the air.
No mark, no plane-trail, jet-growl anywhere.
A Wind from Africa
Was it reading the butterfly book in the garden,
the poetry of Lepidoptera,
the common verse of the field?
Gatekeeper. Meadow Brown. Small Heath.
Orange Tip. Ringlet. Marsh Fritillary.
Was it a flick of the Gulf Stream’s tail, the must
of lion breath, that southern wind that brings
swallows and clouds of red Saharan dust
that made the beech tree suddenly sing
with a thousand flickering wings?
The tree dizzy with dancers, manifold
desert reds, Moroccan gold,
Painted Ladies – on an Odyssey
from Africa, wings on the wind
over continents and seas.
All summer they lingered, feeding, for all we knew
on our burdock and thistles, sipping rain and honeydew.
They live to breed, be beautiful and die.
All winter, ghost butterflies in the tree,
and snow, white wings falling from the sky.
Running Away to the Sea – 1955
It might have been heatstroke, the unfocused flame of desire
for a name in a book, a face on the screen, the anonymous
object of love. Two schoolgirls running like wildfire,
bunking off through dunes to the sea, breathless.
We were lost and free, East of Eden.
It was James Dean, Elvis, Bill Haley and the Comets.
It was Heartbreak Hotel on the gramophone.
It was Heathcliff by torchlight in bed after lights-out.
The dunes were molten glass. We slowed to a dawdle,
rippling sand with our toes, grains of gold
through our fingers, on our skin, in our hair,
without words to say why, or who, or where.
This I remember. The hour was still, bees
browsing sea lavender, and beyond the dunes
the channel as blue as the Gulf of Araby,
a name from the drowse of a daydreaming lesson,
sun on the board, the chalk, Sister’s hand, a far-away
voice, as if heard through water, murmuring rosaries:
Egypt, the Red Sea, the Bitter Lakes, Suez.
A psalm of biblical names called Geography.
That was the last day the world stood still. In a year
there’d be tanks in Budapest, over Sinai bombers on the move,
and I’d be in the streets on the march against war,
as empires loosened their grip. It was almost like love.
Pheidippedes’ Daughter
for Catrin
Long silver girl who slipped easy
and early from the womb’s waters,
whose child-breath was a bird in a cage,
the inhaler in her fist her amulet,
grew tall, beautiful, caught her breath,
outran the hound, the hare, the myth,
the otter, salmon, swallow, hawk,
the river, the road, the track.
She texts again – this time Santiago.
She’s counting seven cities underfoot,
running the bloodlines of language, lineage,
for Ceridwen’s drop of gold, an ear of corn,
to leave the Battle of Marathon and run
through pain and joy with news to the gates of a city,
to arrive at the finishing line, and say,
‘Nenikékamen – We have won.’
Storm-Snake
A day of summer heat
in central France, breathless before storm,
then a stir of wind like the whispering of wheat
or rosaries, the black sky warm
above a million hectares of fertility.
A sudden growl of warning in the stones,
over the mountains, serpents of electricity,
unease as old as Eden.
The storm breaks shimmering over Limousin,
the sound of weighty matter heaved across
the floor of heaven, till earth is diamond,
and here on the road, belly up, crushed,
a little silver snake, like lightning’s memory,
someone’s initial signed on an old story.
Oradour, 10 June 1944
Silence in the empty streets, the square,
the shuttered houses, sun-blind boulangerie,
dressmaker, surgery, school, Mairie.
At the oil-clothed table in the shade of a vine,
Madame Roufanche is pouring a rough red wine,
ladling cassoulet into yellow bowls,
with a crusty cheese, an armful of warm loaves
brought home that morning, the dew still
on the fields, her quilt like a cloud on the sill.
We could have been here, passing through, like now,
could have risen, restored, in love, from the bed
in the room overlooking the square, could have shared
her table, her man home from work, a nod, nothing said,
could have talked in French, in smiles, in gesturing hands,
in the raise and ring of glasses, the breaking of bread.
That long ago summer the house, the church, the dead
in their graves, the streets, the square, all spread
under the linen of silence, sunlight, noon,
waiting for boots, orders, the struck match, the gun,
the church full of women fired, men in the burning barn,
and safe in the future, we and our love not born.
A Glory in Llanberis Pass
In the dream I walk the path again,
up, up in the mist and rain,
heart and foot springing in sparse light,
eyes down, foot, scree, foot, turf, foot, stone,
to rise through the glory like a salmon leaping the falls,
up, up through a hole in the sky, a ring of fire,
a rainbow like an oriel window,
the iris of God’s eye.
Shearwaters on Enlli
for Michael Longley
Michael, the oldest known ringed bird
is a Manx shearwater, near sixty and going strong.
I choose it as llatai, bird-messenger, sea-crier
for the poet of flight and song.
Midnight, midsummer, and almost dark
but for the loom of Dublin at the rim of the world,
flocks of shearwaters home in from the sea,
like the souls of twenty thousand saints
come to reclaim their holy remains.
They flare in the sweep of the lighthouse beam,
a sigh of sparks, an outcry of angels, a scream
as if they feel it, the shock of the light
then the dark after the long day’s flight
in the troughs of the waves.
Doused one by one, each footless bird to its burrow.
And I
to mine, a damp nest in the lighthouse,
every swing of the beam a wing feathered with gold
fires the room all night, a blaze against the cold.
Enlli: Bardsey Island
White Cattle of Dinefwr
Ghosting the valley still, ten centuries
since the time of Hywel Dda, their dreaming heads
sway below the castle and Black Mountain
against the sky.
Luminous as white flowers
at dusk, a thousand years of moonlight,
their legendary silver lit dark times
before power fired the windows of the house.
Like sewin silvering upstream to spawn
in Tywi and its tributary streams,
white fire, electric, veins of history,
the cattle innocent of their lineage,
how it moves us, brings to mind our story –
Rhodri Mawr, the Lord Rhys, Hywel Dda –
grazing dusk pastures,
pale as the first stars.
Six Bells
for the forty-four miners killed in the explosion on 28 June 1960
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