Gower

Rage, Rage 18

Rage, Rage
18


I nod off again and dream
of a summer beach,
burning sand, tide way out,
sparkling waves, clouds moving,
inaudible, as they drift by.

I dream of my beginning
and find a forlorn formlessness
that sought the solace of sound
only to discover waves and wind
as I drifted on an amniotic sea.

The wind of change has blown.
I awake and pick up my book.

Voltaire –
“Si jeunesse savait,
si vieillesse pouvait.”

“If youth knew,
if age were able to.”

Comment:

The wind of change has blown and, by all accounts, it is still blowing. A Nor’ Easter here, swinging down from the Arctic and bringing us cold weather, ice, and more snow. Driving isn’t too bad, for the roads are cleared regularly, especially when schools are in. Most enterprises have cleaned, salted, and sanded their premises. Some haven’t. Yesterday, it took two people to move my shopping cart from the shop to the car, a matter of about thirty yards. The wind was so strong. It tussled and tugged, drove me where I didn’t want to go, and two people stepped in to help me. Then I discovered an undug doorway. I parked my car at a sharp upward angle, on the snow. A man offered me his arm. I said no, but he stood beside me, hands held out to help, just in case. Leaving that same shop, I was accompanied by a young lady who insisted on carrying my bags, taking my arm, and leading me to my car. The dangers of falling on down hill ice were even greater than going uphill.

I dream of my beginning, more and more often nowadays and now-a-nights. I know, spell check underlined that word. A neologism, not a proper word. But I like it, for though I dream by day, nodding suddenly into a shallow sleep, it is by night that I really do my dreaming.

At night, I find I can roam a world that has become hostile in the light of day. I can, and do, dream of my childhood on the Gower Peninsula. The fields are still there. My grandmother walks among the bluebells, and together we tell the time by the old dandelion clock. The larks still rise on Bishopston Common and Bluebells, Cowslips, and Primroses still hide beneath the trees. The sands at Brandy Cove are still clean. There is no pollution in my dreams and no oilers clear their tanks in the pristine waters of the Severn Estuary. There is no industrial haze and, on a clear day, I can still see, from the steps of the bungalow, Ilfracombe, across the bay.

And the people – my family and friends are still there. My uncles and aunts, my cousins, all young still, my parents and my grandparents … and all my dogs return, one by one, from their canine adventures. At night the cows can be heard crunching grass, and wheezing in my dreams. I met one, once, on a night trip to the outhouse – we had no indoor plumbing. And, on one memorable night, I stepped into a wet, warm cow patty, left like an anti-personal landmine, just outside the back door. I still shiver as I think of that warmth creeping up between my toes. No amount of wiping has ever really removed it. It haunts like the ghosts of summers past that drift at midnight round my room. waiting to be plucked from the air.

Which food, when you eat it, instantly transports you to childhood?

Daily writing prompt
Which food, when you eat it, instantly transports you to childhood?
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Which food, when you eat it, instantly transports you to childhood?

That’s an easy one – diolch yn fawr / thank you very much – and the answer is Bara Lawr / laverbread of course.

What does laverbread taste like? I must thank Wikipedia for the answer below.

Welsh Laverbread (PDO) | Business Wales - Food and drink

Welsh Laverbread is made from cooked laver (seaweed) which has been plucked by hand from the Welsh coastline. It has a unique texture and salty flavour which provides a taste of the fresh, Welsh sea. Laver or Laver porphyra umbilicalis is the only seaweed which is only one cell thick.

And click on the link for a video from YouTube on the Traditional Welsh breakfast.

Laverbread could be found all around the Gower Peninsula in my childhood. When I was very young, you could buy it at Swansea Market for three pence a pound. Later, the price went up to sixpence a pound. When I lived in Cardiff, back in the early sixties, it sold at a pound per pound. Later, as the coast around Wales became more and more polluted, the sea weed had to be imported from the West of Ireland, and that certainly drove the price up – five pound a pound in the eighties.

But laverbread has two histories – the scientific / culinary one, and the personal one. Laverbread, on the plate, looks suspiciously like a cowpat. So much so, that when the cows visited the bungalow field where we had our summer home, the cowpats were called laverbread. “Don’t step in the laverbread, dear.”

Field rolling was a childhood joy. Start at the top of the slope and roll all the way down to the bottom. Born and bred in a laverbread field, we would plot our route between the patties before we rolled. Alas, our London cousins, with their cockney accents, were city and street wise, but not laver bread wise. Down the field they rolled, without looking, right through the laverbread patches. I leave the ensuing scene to you imaginations – and remember that the bungalow had no electricity in those early days, and no running water.

I remember the first day my beloved came to visit us at home. My mother served her fresh hot laverbread. Of course, she had never seen anything like it, except genuine Somerset cowpats. She picked around her food, left the laverbread on her plate until it cooled and – “Hold on a moment,” said my mother, “your laverbread’s cold. Here – I’ll warm it up for you.” Poor Clare. I am ashamed to say, I ate her helping while my mother was looking elsewhere – just devoured the extra portion, enjoying every moment, and Clare was so happy to see it disappear.

Here, in New Brunswick, while Clare was away one weekend, Becky and I decided to make laverbread from dulse. We followed the recipes and they worked. The laverbread was delicious – but – ah yes, there’s always a but – but the house stank of the sea shore at low tide and the first thing Clare said when she got home was – “What is that awful smell?”

I remember, opening a closet to get a clean shirt, about six weeks later, and that familiar whiff of the seashore immediately assaulted my nostrils. Alas, Becky and I love our laverbread, but -there’s that word again – but making it in our house long been banned.

World Within

World Within
Anam Cara, p. 15

I have rediscovered a world within me,
a secret world where I walked as a child,
a world that nobody else has ever seen.

When I was young, that world absorbed me.
In it, I went round and round on roundabouts,
and travelled high and low on swings and
swing boats, with their rough ropes.

Alas, as always, there were rainy days.
Then the sun would wear his hat but I knew
he would come out later and join my play.

Sometimes, in the summer, thunderstorms
would roll around and rattle our corrugated roof.
Dai Jones’ cows would rush through the field,
seeking shelter from the wind and rain.

In those days, every cloud had a silver lining.
I weathered tough times, waiting patiently
for the sun to return and light up the world.

One day, I don’t remember when, someone,
I don’t know who, slammed the door and shut
me out from that world. I spent my whole life
searching for it. At last, I have found it again.

Click here for Roger’s reading.

Swansea

Swansea

To be Welsh in Swansea is to know each stop on the Mumbles Railway: the Slip, Singleton, Blackpill, the Mayals, West Cross, Oystermouth, the Mumbles Pier. It’s to remember that the single lines turn double by Green’s ice-cream stall, down by the Recreation Ground, where the trams fall silent, like dinosaurs, and wait, without grunting, for one to pass the other. It’s to read the family names on the War Memorial on the Prom. It’s to visit Frank Brangwyn in the Patti Pavilion and the Brangwyn Hall. It’s to talk to the old men playing bowls in Victoria Park. It’s to know that starfish stretch like a mysterious constellation, at low tide, when the fishnets  glow with gold and silver, and the banana boats bob in the bay, waiting to enter harbour, and the young boys dive from the concrete pipes without worrying about pollution.  But when the tide turns, the Mumbles Railway has been sold to a Texan, the brown and yellow busses no longer run to Pyle Corner, Bishopston, Pennard, Rhossili, sweet names of sand and tide, where my father’s ghost still fishes for salmon bass, casting its lines at the waves as they walk wet footprints up the beach to break down the sand-castle walls I built to last forever at Brandy Cove and by the Slip on Swansea sands.

Click here to listen to Roger’s reading on Anchor.

On Being Welsh – Dydd Dewi Sant

On Being Welsh – Dydd Dewi Sant

On being Welsh
in a land ruled by the English

 I am the all-seeing eyes at the tip of Worm’s Head.
I am the teeth of the rocks at Rhossili.

I am the blackness in Pwll Ddu pool
when the sea-swells suck the stranger
in and out, sanding his bones.

Song pulled taut from a dark Welsh lung,
I am the memories of Silure and beast
mingled in a Gower Cave.

Tamer of aurox, hunter of deer, caretaker of coracle,
fisher of salmon on the Abertawe tide,
I am the weaver of rhinoceros wool.

I am the minority, persecuted for my faith,
for my language, for my sex,
for the coal-dark of my thoughts.

I am the bard whose harp, strung like a bow,
will sing your death with music of arrows
from the wet Welsh woods.

I am the barb that sticks in your throat
from the dark worded ambush of my song.

On Being Welsh – short stories – Amazon and Cyberwit

On Being Welsh – poems included in my selected poems (1979-2009)

Cherry always listened to my readings

Click here to here Roger’s reading on Anchor
– On Being Welsh

Moment

Moment
St. Patrick’s Day

So soft, so subtle, this moment,
when land and sea reach out
and touch each other,
sea hand offered for the land
to raise up and kiss.

The Equinox draws near.
This is the moment when sun and moon,
day and night are equal.
It is the moment when the world
seems to stop, then moves again
in another direction,
from winter’s darkness into daylight
and the spring’s delight.

And still I live in hopes to see
the land of my birth once more,
the land of my fathers
where my father and mother met,
the land where I first saw daylight,
felt the land reach out to the sea,
felt the joy of the sun-licked sea kiss,
saw daffodils dance on the shore,
and swans swimming on the sea.

“And still I live in hopes to see…
Swansea Town once more.”

Click here for Roger’s reading on Acorn.
Moment

On Being Welsh

On Being Welsh

On being Welsh in a land ruled by the English
Dydd Dewi Sant Hapus

             I am the all-seeing eyes at the tip of Worm’s Head.
I am the teeth of the rocks at Rhossili.
I am the blackness in Pwll Ddu pool
when the sea-swells suck the stranger
in and out, sanding his bones.

Song pulled taut from a dark Welsh lung,
I am the memories of Silure and beast
mingled in a Gower Cave.

Tamer of aurox, hunter of deer,
caretaker of coracle,
fisher of salmon on the Abertawe tide,
I am the weaver of rhinoceros wool.

I am the minority,
persecuted for my faith, for my language,
for my sex, for the coal-dark of my thoughts.

I am the bard whose harp, strung like a bow,
will sing your death with music of arrows
unleashed from the wet Welsh woods.

I am the barb that sticks in your throat
from the dark worded ambush of my song.

Click here for Roger’s reading.
On Being Welsh

On Being Welsh

On Being Welsh
in a land ruled by the English

On Being Welsh
in a land ruled by the English
is available at the following links:

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/9388319842

https://www.amazon.com/dp/9388319842

A shortened version of this manuscript was awarded first place in the David Adams Richards Awards for a prose manuscript by the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick, 2020.

Individual stories have been published in Anti-Lang (M. T. Head), West Coast Short Story Slam (Teeth), and on commuterlit.com (Remembrance Day).

Individual stories have won awards as follows: Butterflies (Honorable Mention, Atlantic Short Story Competition, Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia), Auntie Gladys (Finalist, Wordfeast NB, Postcard Stories), Message in a Bottle (Honorable Mention, WFNB Creative Non-Fiction), The Key (Finalist, CBC Short Story Competition), Letting Go (First Place, WFNB Douglas Kyle Memorial, short story).

I would like to thank Lucinda Flemer, Primum Mobile, the first mover, who brought together the KIRA artists and turned them into a creative community. These artists include Geoff Slater and Chuck Bowie, both of whom have influenced the writings in this book. A special thank you must go to Ginger Marcinkowski, my Beta reader, who really deserves an Alpha Grade for all her help and understanding.

I would also like to thank Dr. Karunesh Kumar Agarwal (Managing Editor) Cyberwit.net for his editing skills and his invitation to participate in this poetry series.

Donna Morrissey, award winning Canadian author and judge of the 2020 D. A. Richards Award, wrote the following about my winning submission.

Judge’s Judgement: “This writer’s prose is eloquent, lyrical and beautiful. His stories are disturbing and memorable. It is an evocative journey through the deeply seeing eyes of an old man, and back through his tormented and deeply felt self as a beaten boy. There were times I held my breath against his suffering, and times I applauded his courage to keep on living. At all times I was held by the strength of such writing as would allow me those sparse and limited visuals to the bruising of the flesh whilst leading me directly into the tendered heart. Congratulations.” 

The Story: Set in Tara Manor, a boutique hotel in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, the narrator searches for a story he can write. He rejects the stories and myths of other people and indigenous races, only to discover that he must be the subject of his own tale. It is a story of childhood abuse, first at the hands of his own family and then in Catholic and Protestant boarding schools in Wales where he was sent at the early age of six. It tells of a growing self-distancing from the world, including self-harm and attempted suicide, and then of self-discovery, understanding, and self-forgiveness, far from his Welsh homeland, in the Maritime beauty of Atlantic Canada.

Editor’s Comment: No doubt, here in these poems we are impressed by the ease and strength of the rhythm. Several of these poems show the passionate flight of profound imagination. The poems have poignant force of true feeling. All poems are irresistibly powerful.

Author’s Comment: Poems or stories? Both really, for On Being Welsh is composed of poetry written, not in verse, but in prose. Prose poems then, or poems in prose. How could I write anything but poetry when I come from the same town in Wales as Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins. I too was born with music in my heart and poetry on my lips.

Summer is Ice-Cream

I can’t put a real ice-cream up here,
it might melt and spoil the computers,
yours and mine,
so here’s a cardboard one instead!

… after my grandfather died I slept with my grandmother in her large double bed when I was there on my own … but when all the cousins were there we shared a double bed and three or four of us slept at the top and three or four of us slept at the bottom and we were so small and short in those days that our feet never touched in the middle and the bed was like an earth worm … an octopus earth worm with several heads and no feet … or all the feet in the middle … like a centipede … and sometimes my parents would have to snuggle in with us too … though we scarcely woke up when they arrived or departed … and with tears we would go tired to bed … and the grown-ups would promise that it was only for an hour or two … for a little rest … and we were so far north that the summer sun was in the sky until late at night … but sleep we did and they never woke us up … and we didn’t wake up until the dawn chorus of birdsong … bird after bird chirping and singing in the hedge with its bluebells and primroses … the hedge that divided one bungalow field from the other …

… and we were in the first bungalow field, which was the best one, obviously, because we lived in it … and there was another bungalow field behind us and we could look through the gaps in the hedge and occasionally there were gaps we could crawl through … but they were well guarded because there was an all out war between the two fields and we didn’t like the boys in that second field and they didn’t like us … and we fought our skirmishes through the hedge and at the gaps in the hedge and the people in the field behind us would rent out their bungalows to boys with strange accents who would be instant enemies the moment they opened their mouths or heard us talk and vice versa, the other way round … and it was the silent arrow or spear shot or thrown through the hedge … and the long trailing root set out to trip the unwary, and once we tied a rope across the field, a trip wire to trip those foreign warriors, and we meant to take the rope down before it got dark, but we forgot and we missed the enemy but we caught my father and all the uncles walking back home in the dark from the local pub … and didn’t they trip and all fall down in a great big squealing piglet pile … and the aunties thought it very funny because once they were down, they couldn’t get up again … and the aunties said it had nothing to do with the rope … that they were all falling down anyway, falling down all the way home from the pub they were, and stumbling … but we had hoisted our allies with our own petard and next day we were brought to justice and the justice was severe … and what, they said, if we had caught one of the farmer’s cows … and if it had broken a leg … then who would be responsible then, to the farmer, for payment, and we all hung our heads in shame for those days everyone was big on responsibility and being responsible was a big thing … and even the dog, our scout and protector, our war horse and chariot, for we were Ancient Britons that summer, sat there silent and serious and hung his head in shame at the hot bitter words and he wasn’t even wagging his tail … and the adult jury, twelve sober uncles, tried men and true, all pronounced us guilty and sentenced us to a day without cricket, a day with no jam on the bread, a day in which we must eat up all the greens, a day with no puddings, a day with no sweets, no treats, no ice cream …

… but summer was ice-cream! Who wants ice cream in winter when the hands are cold and the ice wind blows straight down from the Arctic? But in summer, to rob a child of ice-cream is to commit a capital crime against childhood … and the ice cream was miles away, and to run to get it and to bring it back before it melted was a rare adventure that had to be carefully planned … go to the end of the field, run through two sets of lanes, stop at the first ice cream shop and if there was no ice cream there because it had all been eaten by that awful foreign army, run another mile to the next shop … and if you were lucky there would be some ice cream there … and no we didn’t want cones … cones were for the babies … the tiny children who couldn’t control their ice creams … we wanted wafers, like the big boys we were, although we were all still in short trousers … and there were three penny wafers and six penny wafers, and even chocolate bars with thin chocolate on the outside and the ice cream inside … and there were lollipops and other marvels … like Cadbury’s ’99’ … but that day all this was forbidden … forbidden because we had set a trip wire for the enemy and caught, by accident, our very own men … oh the injustice, the burning injustice of it all …

Conkers

Autumn mists in Island View
and maybe, just maybe,
there’s a conker tree out there,
somewhere.

              Autumn in Wales … well now, let me think: autumn was conker season and the national anthem overnight turned from Land of my Fathers to Eye-tiddley-onker… and singing or saying it first — : my first conker  — allowed you to challenge anyone who had a conker and that was always fun, but not so much fun as getting your conker from the conker tree, the horse-chestnut tree, with all its conkers spread across the upper branches, much too high to reach, of course, because all the lower branches had already been picked clean, so you had to throw sticks up high up into the tree at the loftiest conkers in order to bring them down to earth, but it wasn’t much fun trying to catch them as they fell because they came in their little brown autumn jackets with prickles all over them and if you grabbed them in the air, then you got the prickles in your hand and that wasn’t a great idea … though it didn’t hurt all that bad … especially if you wore gloves … so up in the air went the sticks and down came the conkers … then there was  a mad rush to pick them up off the ground and to prise open their bright, shiny jackets … and there they lay, the inedible fruit of the horse chestnut tree, a lovely, rich brown chestnut colour, young warriors dormant  in their little beds … and that was step one …

              … and step two was to prepare them for battle … and there were ways to prepare conkers, secret family ways, passed down from generation to generation … some of us baked our conkers in the oven …  others soaked them in vinegar … or oil and vinegar … before we baked them … and still others left them out in the sun or on a window ledge to slowly dry out until they were hard and vicious and great warriors which could conquer other conkers …