The Poetry Society Celebrating our centenary

Philip Williams

Torfaen

They told us Torfaen – Stone Breaker –

was the older name and that our river

only became grey – Afon Llwyd –

when they came to cut the coal.

“You could not see it for foam,”

my father said. He remembered its speed,

just as fast as we boys found it,

taking the feet from beneath you, taking its toll.

They all but emptied our valley of magic

when they filled in the fields

between each village to form our town.

Except here, behind Ty Pwca,

where the worn lane rises in its steep bend

beyond The Last Bus Stop and The Fairy’s House:

the Pwca, our Bwgi-Man, your Puck.

And there, where the Candwr Brook –

The Singing Waters – still clears her throat

over smooth, cold stones.

So why, I wondered, from Saxton,

an Elizabethan approximation

of the name we had all used all along?

Had the stream, Torfaen, simply lost her voice

as she broadened to a river

somewhere bleaker, blacker, a place

with spittle in its throat, a rattling in its lungs?

Or did our Afon Llwyd only combine

with Torfaen to form one grey, stone-breaking river

when they baptised us all into one Borough

and gave us each a name we never knew?

Petra Christian

Gosmari, Albertel and Carvoncello

I’m thinking of a church in Rome that sits

upon a clutch of secrets, speckled, rare.

Some sixty foot below, there is a house

filled-in and lost, burned down in Nero’s fire;

on this, the people made another house,

next-door a temple; and these are but roots

for what’s above, four hundred years thence:

a basilica which, in turn, gives rise

to our present, built on its very bones.

Bricolage of ages, stones and frescoes,

St Clement’s thousand years of orisons

hushed up a thousand more of unsung chants,

until men broke daylight back in. And I

fell through the clotted seam of now and here,

descended down these vertiginous pasts,

Time more coldly coating me in each layer.

Dropping through a quadruple tier of ghosts,

– oh, but they were such dead, unshy, lively –

I saw what I had come for: the witness,

earliest, extant, to Italian.

Found in a fresco, flaking on the wall,

half-grown away from its crib of Latin,

the writing goes with a quaint miracle:

St Clement, as saints will, has caused a fuss,

and his arrest is ordered by a lord.

But when the heavies come to take him in

they find him heavier than sin, for they

mistake a fallen column for the man,

arrest, and try to heave, the masonry,

while St Clement steals home, unseen unheard,

muttering (in Latin). What are the words

so precious, with which we glimpse the tilting

of tongues? A prayer to accompany this

comic affair? A bible verse? A song?

It is the nobleman’s demented hiss,

his profane raging at the three blackguards:

– Fili dele pute, traite!

– Go on, you sons of bitches, pull!

Sally Goldsmith

Received Pronunciation

As a boy, my Sussex granddad could

spot the runty dillin in a pig’s litter,

play the fool down the pleached twittern,

cry fainits when he wanted out of the game,

make jokes about the daglets on a sheep’s bum

comparing them to his own number two’s.

From the Warwickshire lot I got

the blart of waltzers at Stratford Mop,

learned to swill the sink after washing up,

to call down the jutty at the side of the ’us –

loud enough to wake the diddikais about whom

my mother said I never should.

In rural Oxfordshire, I wuz moi duck

to aunts who let me tiffle biddy hens

off their eggs, bring in pecked bottles

of miwk off of the step, nudged me

out of looking a sawney, warned me

to avoid the bunt of boys or even a cow.

In Sheffield now with you, flower,

I look after us tranklements, crozzle

my bacon and modge my pudding,

put the door on t’ sneck, go to t’ foot

of our stairs, let da into t’ entry, talk

clarty at neet, lake and love da till ah dee.

Josie Turner

In

I’m tough, you said, towards the end, knowing

it is hard to stop. The shuttle wants to

weave new cloth – we find words; we slot the tongue

of the buckle into a makeshift notch.

Your old saying – I want a new nothing

to hang by my side – resounds. Its after-

shocks of silence taste bitter in my mouth.

I lick the iron bridle, then spit it out.

We are swayed to be makers. Taken with

the class on a lashing afternoon to

a still-raw dual carriageway that mocked up

the land, with plastic earth on our hard hands

we twisted bulbs into an embankment,

so they might bloom one day in the distance.

Frances Green

Time Capsules

They buried both tins together

somewhere under the apple trees,

to be re-discovered in one thousand years

but they weren’t sure, since he could not

converse with them, that he would understand.

His little sister, bright and brilliant, sucked on a pencil

and decided upon: her last Barbie’s best dress;

her own second favourite hair slide; a photograph

of her and Father Christmas at Selfridges;

and three old unwanted Girl Talk magazines.

His own tin looked empty in comparison.

They smiled at him indulgently:

for his twigs; his grass cuttings; his fallen leaf;

and those two red and yellow sweet wrappers

he had kept under his pillow for months.

They did not see that in the space around these things

lay all the fragrances of spring and summer,

the rich descents of autumn, and the sharp scented crackle

of winter fires. Don’t you want

to put anything else in here? they asked him.

He looked at them, uncomprehending –

because there was nothing else or better to be saved

but he wasn’t sure, since they could not

converse with him, that they would understand.

Lois Wilson

Postcards for Dorothy Pinkney

I imagine him to be a veteran,

An old, surviving man, but in fact

His words are younger than I’ll ever be again.

Those thirty-seven postcards carry

Only thirty-seven times a dozen words.

And they’re enough to gather up my mother’s

Mother’s mother’s worth. Her whole collection

Left to us is just behind that frame, those

Thirty-seven swirling, fading nicknames.

Dearest Pink of Perfection. Nothing more

Or less was necessary then. Now,

Only the pictures are seen. The backs

Are what we memorised before we hid – protected –

Every single one of them behind a screen.