Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Low water now and the motley of crabbers
is crammed towards the end of the pier,
leaving space for a merry metaphor
of our times, Uncle Tacko’s Flea Circus,
with its innuendo and innocence,
its knowingness and charm, its vaudeville
of outrageous unnuanced half-truths,
its charivari of anachronisms.
The Bulkeley Hotel on the front (once
a private mansion of many rooms)
and the stone terrace of late Georgian
town houses in this holiday resort
speak of its erstwhile strategic value.
Along the path beside the forestry road,
through the plantation of pine and larch
planted as saplings to keep the dunes in check,
there is a first sighting of the island
with its mediaeval saint’s ruined chapel,
between the trees and across a sandy beach.
Out of sight is a pebbly strand exposed
except at the highest tides: an impromptu
causeway – for holiday makers now;
once, for lovers to the chapel with its
rumours of martyred blessings;
The harbour breakwater built from limestone blocks
was the longest that the Admiralty
had commissioned. How important Ireland seemed!
On the Country Park lake sown with lilies
an old man sails his battleship. The lake
was a man-made pond that served the brickworks,
built to make the harbour buildings that are dressed
in the limestone quarried from the crags
beside which visitors park their cars.
A grass path leads through heather and gorse
down to low cliffs above the pebble shore.
Beside the first angle in the zigzag steps
that descend steeply to the lighthouse –
where I have stopped to rest lungs and knees
and vow again this will be the last –
unique to this place on our planet
a fleawort is growing, its flowerheads
like miniature sun flowers. A red beaked chough
calls from the heathland above – pyrrhocorax,
pyrrhocorax. I can see Ireland from here –
the hills and mountains south of Dublin –
On the coast road across the straits the blue flash
of an ambulance appears, then disappears
behind a stand of trees and a barn.
The mainland late morning is so pellucid
one might almost count the dry stones in the walls
that mark the fields, climb past the sparse woods
and delineate the cropped moorlands
from the mountain tops. A cannon thud
starts the regatta of red sailed dinghies.
They scud and tack on the silvery straits,
their spinnakers burgeoning vainly.
Walking – toward the town – down Henlys Lane,
its low, lichen covered dry stone walls
adorned with bird’s-foot trefoil, its borders
with cow parsley and, where run-off
gathers from Baron’s Hill, red campion,
we note ahead, amongst the cattle,
the usual, large flock of herring gulls,
facing south in the low-lying marshy field.
All as we have come to know and like.
But, today, we hear an explosion – loud
enough but too workaday to be thunder.
We stop and look beyond the library,
We came here first maybe fifty years ago –
Porth Trecastell aka Cable Bay
(on Ynys Môn aka Anglesey) –
a small Iron Age hill fort on one headland,
a Neolithic grave on the other,
and a telephone cable to Ireland
in between. This bank holiday the bay
is busy – paddlers, bathers, canoeists.
In the gated burial chamber –
Barclodiad y Gawres, which translates,
‘the full apron of the giantess’ –
its prehistoric graffiti secured
against vandals,
THE COLSTON BUN
THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
A SORT OF EDEN
A SORT OF EDEN
PHILLIS WHEATLEY: 1753-1784