Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Caernavon Bay is below, and to the west
the Irish Sea. The restive winds and waves
are lulled now to a breath, to a swell.
In the distance the London-Holyhead train
crosses the causeway. A multi-decked ferry
from Dublin is entering the harbour.
After the Druids hid, and the Romans left,
there came a multitude of saints, mostly
martyrs, not infrequently princesses,
renowned in death for healing the heart’s anguish.
St Gwenfaen – ‘Blessed White Rock’ –
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.
At the bottom of the valley – here briefly
more gorge than valley – the ice age river
runs white and rapid. Deep in its narrow banks
rest the vast brick columns of the aqueduct
that carries, in a narrow cast iron canal,
one hundred and twenty seven feet above,
water from the river tapped upstream –
Thomas Telford’s genius, recognised
as one with the Statue of Liberty,
the Taj Mahal and the Acropolis
and become a stop for Japanese tourists.
Above the valley along the toll road
Telford built from Holyhead to London
is the scattered village developed and named
for the aqueduct –
The fog bell sounds every thirty seconds.
A shag bobs in the swell by the lighthouse
painted black and white with the legend
‘No Passage Landwards’ on its east and west sides.
An occasional heavy wave thumps the beach.
I climb the high bank of sea-smoothed pebbles
from the landward side and hear and feel them
chafe and slip. At the seaward foot of the mound –
a petrified wave three times my height –
an angler stands, motionless, his rod propped
on a tripod, the line taut in the tide.
CELEBRITY
CELEBRITY
THE NETHER PORTAL
THE MERMAID'S PURSE
IN PRAISE OF HERB ROBERT