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| A door out of the dark ... Ty Newydd |
Life runs at a faster
pace than blogging. That’s my excuse. Even so, I’m shocked that I’ve yet to
blog about what’s been going on. The visit to Little Gidding in the summer,
Farrar House closed ‘due to illness’ and the church all to myself and a copy on
the pews of The Four Quartets. I read the poem aloud, like liturgy, all abuzz
with déjà vu and the cadence of it. To know the place for the first time.
Nor have I mentioned another
Nantwich win – second prize this time – with my Aberfan poem (anniversary this
last week) Sixty Six.
Nor have I written about
the Fellowship of St Alban & St Sergius conference and the visit to the
Orthodox monastery at Tolleshunt Knights.
I’d not yet published a
link to the University of Chester publication from the High Sheriff’s Cheshire
Prize.
Or the week’s Master
Class at Ty Newydd, now just (as we used to say in South Wales) with Gillian
Clarke, Imtiaz Dharker and some exceptionally talented participants. What a
great place and some terrific people! Sean Borodale breezed in for a reading
from Bee Journal and his latest collection.
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| 'The mountain sheep are sweeter ...' no, it's one of mine this tiime |
I remember Gillian
Clarke from school, when she came in to give readings and then took up her
first ‘residency’ – an unusual thing in those days, particularly for a ‘bog-standard
comprehensive’ like ours. She remembers us two – identical twin curly-headed
boys, rusty blond. My brother recited The War Song of Dinas Fawr for some
French visitors, dressed in an old sheepskin rug. When her husband, David
Morgan, arrived on the last evening he took one look at me and said, ‘The
mountain sheep are sweeter ...’
People still can’t tell
us apart.
Sure, I put these things
on Facebook but it’s about time I blogged them here.
I’ll let the photos
speak for themselves.
I’ll try to be quicker
next time - our 21st wedding anniversary just gone, our visit to
Italy to see Kat, working as an au pair.
Here’s Sixty Six to be
going on with:
SIXTY SIX
Words spill from the radio to
pool
on the hearth mat. The slow,
backward
grate of the chair legs speak for
his father –
sitting with them before a later
shift –
as he leaves mug and plate, lifts
the latch on the cwtch to fetch his cap,
boots, spade. They watch him join
the fist of men already clenching
in the street, glance as if to fix
them in the door-frame then turn
to trudge.
There are clumps and knots of
neighbours
climbing. It is then he feels his
mother’s fingers
press into his flesh with a
painful love,
as though for those others,
scrabbling
with only their nails into spoil
and slurry
before his father joins them,
delves
with his shovel deeper into the
dark.
