broken-beautiful / haddwch-toredig

rhoddonsant enw saesneg i'r storm

they gave the storm an english name

and as it ebbs away 

a barley moon waxes jaundice

over a drowned estuary

a piercing, pale imitation of a sun

who we have emboldened to beat us ever harder 

and in the fast-silence of a rising tide

the uncannily human tone of a sheep bleating hysterically 

                                      more nimble, or buoyant

than these cap-sized cattle – now bloating in the humid half-light

that was someone’s lively-hood 

        someone’s heritage 

       perhaps, someone’s reason to mistrust, or hate, outside these borders and boundaries 

             of horthorned hedgerows

barbed-wired pheasant pens

old mine shafts and warning signs 

private property and felled trees

these valleys’s steep mono-green sides

and bottom of grey bedrock:

                a landscape of profit and loss…

i’r rhai hynny

mae pob trên yn mynd i'r dwyrain  

for them all trains go east

back then - they made you burrow their ideals deep into the hill-side:

          tin chapels and tin kingdoms 

  stolen monkey puzzles and Himalayan rhododendron 

pylons, inclines and narrow-gage railways

empire scared itself into the very contours

a cartography of self-harm 

and arrogance 

spit black dust into the atmosphere 

then suck it back into your lungs

the quarry-master shouts:

“haul up your grief, bois bach

your limp child

your wages”

paid by the pound

paid in deference to a god and monarch

                 who told you - you are nothing

and what is left of you all now?

particles of blood, sweat and hurt 

from every generation

settled as sediment – compressed into roof-slate

the rain running off you, as easily as you break

the bulk of you wasted

spoil strewn under tight uniform roots

arid loose soil

makes for piss-poor irrigation

butt, bach…

…atop the mountain

through the slag heaps

a series of new waterfalls

      creates a unique habitat

                    where wilded adits now echo with soft quiet drops 

there is peace here amongst the chattering canopy 

life. compost. hypha.

milk caps sprout the old cutting shed

ivy has re-claimed the winch-house

and bird song belches from old chimney stacks

a glistening web made of

chiselled graffiti and pine needles 

         of rusted cables and rowan berries

                         and that one spot of mottled sunlight you all sat, exhausted, by the cabana 

a congregation of stories and languages

of close harmony, community and resistance 

y lle hwn / this place

its nature and folk, belongings and memories

its way back when, right now and whatever will be’s

lap against the coast line

eddie in the river’s pool

spills over sand

as a myriad ventricles meeting

a confluence of gilded fractures

broken-beautiful

bleeding into the sea 

                               as are we all

harddwch-toredig

yr ydym oll

as the barley moon waxes golden

over a quiet estuary 

wrth i leuad yr haidd droi’n euraid 

uchben aber dawel