Dŵr by Mike Jenkins

Clouds –
whole valleys-sides covered in berries
ripe and ready for the picking,
a steep rock-face with overgrown heather,
a flock of black sheep running
to be rounded up and sheared by the wind:
water with its roots in the sky.

Rain –
the drizzly seeds of droplets sown,
the slanting sea-strewn westerlies
which turn clothing into blotting paper,
the aching storms which gravel
into bones, making you shrink and cower.

Valleys –
scooped and scoured out by laws,
people cleared away like shanty-dwellers
bossed by bulldozers, memories
left to night-writers, to bells
tolled by feeding streams and rivers,
to drought and dereliction exposed.

Reservoirs –
acid funnels of the conifers
press down soil to stop it slipping;
to trippers they seem like mirrors,
but they balance water on scales
tapping mountains for its wealth.

Pipelines –
over the border, moving like a train
with trucks of coal, like iron and steel
liquid and molten, like the feet
of all those who had to leave
muttering ‘Money, money…’ forced
against the gradient, longing for sea.

Chemicals –
a layer of aluminium the surface sheen,
the weight of lead its depths
and those substances meant to purify
unseen in a clear glass, lurking like radiation.

Houses –
the old person whose grasp of time
runs through knotted fingers and down the drain,
children whose minds become stagnant;
families knowing when it’s cut off
water’s precious as air when they choke
on the stench of their own cack,
as germs breed with cockroaches and rats.

Dŵr –
they’ve stolen the word, those safe-lock faces,
mispronounced it ‘Door’, reinforced and vaulted
below reservoirs where they’ve counted
profits from broken bones of village walls,
from a thirst which opens mouths
in fledging questions to the clouds.

By Mike Jenkins
from This Houses, My Ghetto

Additional information: Dŵr is the Welsh word for water. The line referring to it being mispronounced as ‘door’ regards a common mistake people make when first learning how to say it if unfamiliar with Welsh pronunciation. the elongated ‘oo’ sound of dŵr is ‘oohr’ not ‘or’. To approximate the pronunciation think of the word sounding like ‘dew-er’ but don’t stress the second syllable so it becomes ‘dewr’.

Since I’m speaking about Welsh pronunciation I might as well note how amusing it is to read in every Russian-English dictionary the explanation that the Cyrillic letter ‘Ч’ “… sounds like the ‘ch’ in the Scottish word ‘loch’…” since that sound exists in the Brythonic language of Welsh e.g. Chwarae (ch-wah-rye) which means ‘play’ as in the popular Welsh phrase ‘chwarae teg‘ (teg = ‘teh-guh’) meaning ‘fair play’.

Advertisement

Tenancies by R.S. Thomas

 This is pain's landscape.
 A savage agriculture is practised
 Here; every farm has its
 Grandfather or grandmother, gnarled hands
 On the cheque-book, a long, slow
 Pull on the placenta about the neck.
 Old lips monopolise the talk
 When a friend calls. The children listen
 From the kitchen; the children march
 With angry patience against the dawn.
 They are waiting for someone to die
 Whose name is as bitter as the soil
 They handle. In clear pools
 In the furrows they watch themselves grow old
 To the terrible accompaniment of the song
 Of the blackbird, that promises them love.
 
 
By R.S. Thomas
 from Not That He Brought Flowers (1968)  

The Un-born by R. S. Thomas

I have seen the child in the womb,
neither asking to be born
or not to be born, biding its time
without the knowledge of time,
model for the sulptor who would depict
the tranquility that inheres
before thought, or the purity of thought
without language. Its smile forgave
the anachronism of the nomenclature
that would keep it foetal. Its hand
opened delicately as flowers
in innocency's grave.
Was its part written? I have seen
it waiting breathlessly in the wings
to come forth on to a stage
of soil or concrete, where wings
are a memory only or an aspiration.

by R. S. Thomas
from Mass for Hard Times (1992)

There by R.S. Thomas

They are those that life happens to.

They didn’t ask to be born

In those bleak farmsteads, but neither

Did they ask not. Life took the seed

And broadcast it upon the poor,

Rush-stricken soil, an experiment

In patience.

What is a man’s

Price? For promises of a break

In the clouds; for harvests that are not all

Wasted; for one animal born

Healthy, where seven have died,

He will kneel down and give thanks

In a chapel whose stones are wrenched

From the moorland.

I have watched them bent

For hours over their trade,

Speechless, and have held my tongue

From its question. It was not my part

To show them, like a meddler from the town,

their picture, nor the audiences

That look at them in pity or pride.

 

by R. S. Thomas

from Pietà (1966)

The Garden by R. S. Thomas

It is a gesture against the wild,

The ungovernable sea of grass;

A place to remember love in,

To be lonely for a while;

To forget the voices of children

Calling from a locked room;

To substitute for the care

Of one querulous human

Hundreds of dumb needs.

 

It is the old kingdom of man.

Answering to their names,

Out of the soil the buds come,

The silent detonations

Of power weilded without sin.

 

by R. S. Thomas

from The Bread of Truth (1963)