Category: Poems

Two

I thought then that we were two

Snowflakes from different clouds

We met and melted in the same soggy puddle and had

No problem with being wasted and wet.

We were two pieces from different jigsaw puzzles

Fallen lonely under the same frail table, able to admit

to each other, that neither could fit.

We were two young birds

That flew over the same land and saw

Joy that others standing below

Were blind to.

“What are we now?” I asked you last night:

Me, with my nest in the west;

You, the restless swallow, staying

For ever shorter summers.

2000

Gut Reaction

My belly was a shy smile that hid from cameras and women like you.

Not so much a six-pack as a back pack, on the front.

My old zip-less cardigan that used to keep me warm.

A pillow stuffed with jam and cheese and milk.

My bald school friend to whom I’d confide. Who never lied.

An inverted bath tub always full, fun and guggling.

My cuddly love bundle rotunda, my ticklish Welsh-white tundra.

Hanging like a landslide, laughing like an earthquake.

Breaking icy silence.

As warm as your breath.

As soft as your lips.

written at Tŷ Newydd 2000

Union

Union is good;

When hooded bullets fly in Belfast,

When old Etonians chum-up and chop-up our NHS.

When Scotland votes for #Indyref,

When Wales wants its voice to be heard.

Don’t be absurd; Union

is good. In Barcelona and Bilbao,

All is well, just right now.

Stay strong and united,

We will look after you all.

–

Union is bad;

On BBC News, in The Mail and The Sun

Which side will you choose?

When workers stand up to fight,

When Ireland wants to unite,

When peace in Europe gives power to the poor

To block banks from greed and theft

When the Kurds are left bereft

In all areas with oil or gas.

Union is, alas,

a bad idea, just right now.

Which side will you choose?

Which side will you choose?

–

2017

A poem for my twin daughters on Shakespeare’s birthday 2014

Two tin pots that boil at their brims

Flare up, free in a confluence of careful

Genetic coincidence.

The X and Y do not ask why

This attraction lies in magnets

Made from the same

Mortal magma. Nor will I ever.

Or two quarks perhaps, two

Parts caught in one

Quartz incredibly crystallized.

Unbreakable fizzing fission,

Fusion unmeldable,

A star sat in a star, a sun

Within a sun and one

Shall the other swallow up,

As primroses pop out in green

Grass in purple spring.

Sing, sing, sing a verse and a verse,

Then a chorus sweet divine harmony.

My honeyed loves, my peace, my doves of life,

My wife and me know our melodies’ refrain,

So, so, so lucky, we can smile

And sing again and again.

So son me no sons oh Lord,

For they would be out shone

Outdone divine,

By my twin daughters.

Cwm Chwefru

I left Huet at Llanfihangel

Brynpabuan, under the fronded

red frown of Allt y Clych,

newly risen and cold

in autumn mist,

and followed the lonely, lovely

screech of the hawk, down

to Crossroads and to Chwefru

to meet Price

and Jones

for a walk.

–

Below us, a flowing fossil,

silurian silver, the river

rushed to leave the cwm

as we breathed in sweet,

sweating mountains

and walked on.

–

Arguing like dogs we passed by

green-skinned telegraph

poles turned native by darkness

and dampness, past the holy quarry,

past the black oily remains of a

lamb. Past. Limp

plastic wires wound

down the lane, hanged

like lies between each

pole carrying last

century’s civilisation

to the coupé couples

in the holiday.com cottages

further down the rainsoaked cwm.

(Those ones from off, who come

to get away from it all

but who, free in their excruciating exile,

are always forced, eventually

to bring hell with them anyway)

–

And below, the rock snake,

the cambrian carver, the river

rushed to leave the cwm as we 

three swapped our aunties and uncles,

second cousins and third cousins,

our lovers and wives

and walked on.

–

Grey squirrels, leaping like lizards,

infested and abused the branches

above our heads; bold brazen Yankee rats,

with miles better PR than the Wicked Welsh

Weasels who hide in the heart

of the glyn’s dour slopes.

On a crag, on Craig Chwefru,  we glimpsed

a rogue, a robber, a runaway

pursued by a dandy with no nose, who

implored the fleet footed fugitive to

“…flee! In English! For Christ’s sake flee!”

Before they both became a single silhouette,

And disappeared over the jutting

sheep’s jaw of a rock, still shouting

about Buffalo Bill and

the Builth Sioux Butcherers.

–

And below, the amniotic poison,

the sparkling mercury, the river

rushed to leave the cwm as we

three shared stories of lost and stolen

words and cursed and cursed and cursed

and walked on.

–

We walked on and then I stopped and noted in my book,

“There are no wild animals in Wales”.

“And soon, no wild places”, added Price

“Nor wild men, nor wild women”, said Jones

“Consider me!” suddenly she sang;

the Robin Goch, and we turned like Dafydd Gam

to see her song, hanging bloody on a broken bough,

rebel-red and fierce like a wound.

“Why aren’t I the symbol of Wales?”

We three tied our tongues together and

took our answers from the air,

We are an ancient idea,

an imagined verse. Our myths

exile all words. We have

no need for such

a common song.

Yet she sang, sang, sang.

Still she sang so sweetly it

Broke our stupid hearts.

And below, ancient ancestral,

out of time, the Chwefru,

our feral master,

our heathen sage,

rushed over the rocks

into the next ice age.

Time Was

We were sitting with others

In the gardens of a small mansion house,

In the open air of some foreign café bar,

In the sun of Greece, Italy or a good British summer,

In anticipation,

In our future.

–

As I looked out over

The huge flat green expanse of Normandy lawn,

The childhood fields of Doldowlod,

The approach to a ranch in Texas,

The sky became violent,

black above us threatening the day,

fork lightening malfunctioned and

mowed down the lawn towards us.

A twister threatening the ranch.

The safest place is out there, I said to you.

Smelling the rain,

Breathing the wind,

Catching the lightning!

–

You were already making for the inside,

The old museum,

The art gallery,

The ambassador’s party.

With the others, hiding from the rain.

Your thin dress damp around your thighs.

–

As I carried your drink in for you

Through the French window,

Through the stable door,

Through the café entrance

I stopped

  for a second

To kiss the rain.

–

2001

December Sonnet

We blinked and were on the moon. God knows why.

Hills were no longer high enough perhaps.

New mountains grew greater in our white minds,

Filled our curious gaze and left no gaps

For modesty – left to crawl as did slaves.

Pain paved heaven and earth for kings and queens,

–

Then stars surrendered, bowed down, as we craved

Criminal, cranial infinity.

Then came the black stuff to finish us off;

Crude dreams, soon acrid, killed alternatives.

Bernays built empires for the better off

With lies, still loved, that changed the way we live.

Now, for one more dream is all we can ask,

To rescue man from man – our greatest task?

2012

Dyslexia

After 13, I seldom read books. I read girls,

And slowly lined them up

On a small shelf where the dust

Grew thicker on some, more than others,

And got lost in them for months on end.

Some were thumbed quickly,

Some were slow to start, but

Were worth the wait

Some were a laugh, but

Not worth a second read.

Most, I regret, were never finished.

And nearly all now forgotten.

Only one didn’t

Make the shelf.

–

She’s still on the table by my bed

Waiting for me to pick her up again tonight

And start reading on from the place,

Dog-eared in my mind, six years ago.

But I don’t.

Instead,

When the bed swallows me before sleep,

I’ll misquote whole chapters of her aloud.

In this naïve fable, the boy’s browsing

Adolescence matures

On the very last page;

Old enough to read her sad eyes

And know what love means, but

Bold enough to hold onto it like a man.

–

Published in ‘New Welsh Review’ 2000

The Road

The road was a bandage, a blanket, a bridge

Meandering with me as a rock to ripen like sugar

So we could taste the sweetness of foreign food

As we flew past in a blur.

–

We waited with wisdom in lay-bys

And drank with barbarians in strange pubs

But no price was ever sought –

Life was free.

–

Round the corner

A blind dog, a hungry cliff,

A black hole; diamond turned to coal,

And mechanics and

Doctors who counted,

Tallied our bill.

–

2012