Land of my Mothers by Idris Davies

Land of my mothers, how shall my brothers praise you?

With timbrels or rattles or tins?

With fire.

How shall we praise you on the banks of the rhymneying waters,

On the smokey shores and the glittering shores of Glamorgan,

On wet mornings in the bare fields behind the Newport docks,

On fine evenings when lovers walk by Bedwellty Church,

When the cuckoo calles to miners coming home to Rhymney Bridge,

When the wild rose defies the Industrial Revolution

And when the dear old drunken lady sings of Jesus and a little shilling.

 

Come down, O girls of song, to the bank of the coal canal

At twilight, at twilight

When mongrels fight

And long rats bite

Under the shadows of pit-head light,

And dance, you daughters of Gwenllian,

Dance in the dust in the lust of delight.

And you who have prayed in the golden pastures

And oiled the wheels of the Western Tradition

And trod where bards have danced to church,

Pay a penny for this fragment of a burning torch.

It will never go out.

 

It will gather unto itself all the fires

That blaze between the heavens above and the earth beneath

Until the flame shall frighten each mud-hearted hypocrite

And scatter the beetles fattened on the cream of corruption,

The beetles that riddle the ramparts of Man.

 

Pay a penny for my singing torch,

O my sisters, my brothers of the land of my mothers,

The land of our fathers, our troubles, our dreams,

The land of Llewellyn and Shoni bach Shinkin,

The land of the sermons that peddle the streams,

The land of the englyn and Crawshay’s old engine,

The land that is sometimes as proud as she seems.

And the sons of the mountains and sons of the valleys

O lift up your hearts, and then

lift up your feet.

 

by Idris Davies

Advertisement

Industrial Museum by Mike Jenkins

For Adrian Mitchell

 

Hello and welcome to our industrial museum.

 

On your right there’s a slag-heap reclaimed…

a hill… another slag heap…

that one shaped as a landing-pad

for bird-like hang-gliders.

 

Notice the pit-wheels perfectly perserved

where you can buy mementoes

of the Big Strike and eat authentic cawl

at an austere soup-kitchen.

 

There mummified miners cough and spit

at the press of a button

and you can try their lungs on

to a tape-recording of Idris Davies’ poems.

 

That rubble was a 19th century chapel,

that pile of bricks an industrial estate.

The terraced houses all adorned

in red, white and blue as if royalty were visiting.

 

See how quaint the wax models

of women are, as they bow in homage

to polished doorsteps, the stuffed sheep

at the roadside give off a genuine odour.

 

by Mike Jenkins

from Invisible Times