Dressed like a child for our ritual Sunday afternoon pilgrimage to the hillside: your pear-shaped hood, scarf wound like a snake and red ski-boots dragged along like grown-up things worn for a dare.
When I laugh, I don't mean it to hurt. It is the brother of the laugh at the end of our laugh-making - rigid bones melting into blood.
The moor grass has turned into a frosty yellow, its green gone deep into hibernation. We crunch mud, step streams, in games which strip us of years like the trees have been of their leaves. The water and your green eyes share the only motion.
You see a red berry and call it a ladybird. I think of your city upbringing; the seasons being passing strangers through Belfast streets where you cadged rides from the ice.
When the brook's chatter is snow-fed, your laughter is tangled in thorn. You discover an ice sculpture mounted on a spine of reed, and call it 'Teeth and Jaws'. The light of your words travels through it.
High above Merthyr, mountain lapping mountain. You are amazed at the rarified sunlight! When you speak, the numb streets are startled. We leave the childhood of the moorland, to grow taller with a tiredness which is the sister of when we lie, translucent and still, on the single spine of the bed.
by Mike Jenkins from Empire of Smoke
Additional information: Mike Jenkins (born 1953) is a Welsh poet, story writer and novelist writing in English. He taught English at Radyr Comprehensive School in Cardiff for nearly a decade and Penydre High School, Gurnos, Merthyr Tydfil, for some two decades before that. At the end of the 2008–2009 academic year Jenkins took voluntary redundancy. He now writes full-time, capitalising on experiences gleaned from former pupils. He continues to live in Merthyr Tydfil, and has done so for over 30 years. He is also the father of Plaid Cymru politician Bethan Jenkins and journalist Ciaran Jenkins.
An inscription on the grave of one of the children who died in the Aberfan disaster of October 21st, 1966
No grave could contain him.
He will always be young
in the classroom
waving an answer
like a greeting.
Buried alive –
alive he is
by the river
skimming stones down
the path of the sun.
When the tumour on the hillside
burst and the black blood
of coal drowned him,
he ran forever
with his sheepdog leaping
for sticks, tumbling together
in windblown abandon.
I gulp back tears
because of a notion of manliness.
After the October rain
the slag-heap sagged
its greedy coalowner’s belly.
He drew a picture of a wren,
his favourite bird for fraility
and determination. His eyes gleamed
as gorse-flowers do now
above the village.
His scream was stopped mid-flight.
Black and blemished
with the hill’s sickness
he must have been,
like a child collier
dragged out of one of Bute’s mines –
a limp statistic.
There he is, climbing a tree,
mimicking an ape, calling out names
at classmates. Laughs springing
down the slope. My wife hears them
her ears attuned as a ewe’s in lambing,
and I try to foster the inscription,
away from its stubborn stone.
by Mike Jenkins
from Empire of Smoke
Not so Fun facts: This poem refers to the Aberfan disaster the catastrophic collapse of a collieryspoil tip at 9.15 am on 21 October 1966. The tip had been created on a mountain slope above the Welsh village of Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil and overlaid a natural spring. A period of heavy rain led to a build-up of water within the tip which caused it to suddenly slide downhill as a slurry, killing 116 children and 28 adults as it engulfed the local junior school and other buildings. The tip was the responsibility of the National Coal Board (NCB), and the subsequent inquiry placed the blame for the disaster on the organisation and nine named employees.
I’ve been to the town and it’s still a very quiet place to this day as a generation of the community was lost in that disaster. Where the junior school once stood there is now a memorial garden.
Rambling At The Bridge Head 