Selected Poems

Lee Harwood Visits to the Mountains A Colour Chart 1. WINTER CLIMB: CHASM GULLY AND BEYOND It's the quality of light that goes beyond description, amazes. Half way up the gully. The cloud descended. A soft pearly brightness in the mist. A colour as though lit by the surrounding snows. Belayed. Looking down the gully. A world of ice and snow. The colours - blue-grey, grey, white. All shades of white - dirty white, a dim white, a cold clear white. And with dark fingers and blocks of rock sticking up through the snows and mists. And the drop that fades into a grey-white. A luminous light. The only contrast ourselves and the dull red of the rope snaking through the snow and down. As though no time in this near silence, but... We push on and work our way to the ridge top. Working away, zigzagging. All the holds coated in thick ice and the ledges in deep snow. And then at the top, exulted and exhausted. Stepping into knee-deep snow, hail showers, and a fierce wind tugging us about. We head east and down, missing our path, but finding another. And finally back again at the lakeside. Llyn Ogwen a steely black flecked with wave crests. As night closes in the dark grey of clouds silhouetting the mountains. A misty half-moon over Tryfan. 2. NIGHT ASCENT OF CADAIR IDRIS, 1st JUNE 1990 The last light of the setting sun, like a thin wedge of pale luminous jade, caught between a line of dark clouds and the black horizon. When night finally comes we turn and start off. The sweet scent of may blossom as we climb the lower slopes in fading moonlight. An owl calling somewhere below us. In the darkness the lights of distant villages and towns along the coast, and the lighthouses on Bardsey Island and, we wonder, Strumble Head. The faint silvery light gradually dying and leaving us in complete darkness and an unexpected storm once on the ridge. Desperately searching for the way by torchlight. 1.30 a.m. -on the summit-huddled behind a cairn, eventually dozing, only to wake into a grey drizzling dawn. Someone once said there was a legend - if you spent the night on Cadair the next day you came down a madman or a poet. Maybe we came down both. Or maybe the legend belongs to another mountain. But for days after as though floating with these memories. 3. ARENIG FACH: MESSIAEN IN THE MOUNTAINS A hot summer's day. The call of a cuckoo down by the ruined farm. Up on the hill, the mountain, we wade through heather and bilberries to the bare summit. In the distance all the mountains in silhouette, in receding shades of slatey greys and blues. Like a Chinese landscape painting - a whole scroll unrolled - but here. Later by the small lake - sat with our backs against a boulder in the warm sunshine - listening to the birds - ravens, wheatears, skylarks, gulls. And looking east beyond the lake - a loose swirl of gulls high over the moor. Lingering there, as though we wanted such a time to last forever. As I think of that day, I remember your unspoken pleasure in being there but also an underlying sadness and tiredness. This all cuts down deep into the memory. And now listening to Messiaen's "Quartet for the end of time". 4. IF YOU THINK THIS IS JUST DESCRIPTIONS, IT ISN'T Picture of a lead grey lake with snow falling, hurled across one's vision. Ice like large feathers laid beside and across each other covering the water.

Ralph Hawkins

East Glamorgan
I

What do you fear
You don't tell me
These are awful days & nights
Turning from facing
Hold my hand
When you didn't
Or I can't remember
It's always too late
Shouting
He doesn't speak
His eyes wander
Hillsides
Melodies
We could never have been here sooner


II

Muted birds fill
A flash of flowering through the curtain
Memory stirs
The life support gurgles
Lignocaine per drops per minute

Bruised flesh
Openings
River water, ash & young oak to
A sky cloud haphazard
Wounds like wind-fall
Traffic drizzle


They call for absence
Bric-a-brac or dust
It serves as a jaunt up the mountainside
Water from the spring
Between when & went
Before turning & closing
Before not wanting to leave


III

Evening dims through the window
Whispers another world
But all there is is a rough car park
Gravel strewn
Bouldered by cones
Lock it up
By bed belong
These awful days & nights
At last he sleeps
A world so flush with false promise


IV

Perhaps there's snow outside
It feels like
Down the mountain Rowan
Or frost adazzle in a dream
There's always more to come
Jackdaws hang by threads
Near the quiet pines
The path of fallen needles
I fear more of the worse
Call it dark light
Perhaps wind & storm bells
Perhaps more of the Bright side

Wendy Mulford A Handful of Quietness, a Hand Full of Quietness Dreaming [SWANSEA] the curve of the bay under a line of the poet's death dinosaurs' triumph the child's bedroom tap and shape as if all this belonged together the far-off roar of lights from the port a western garden dropping sheer stonyness spilling over a youth of optimism picking the coasters unable to imagine how they might intercept weather squalls across the freight jettison & in fair time dreaming linked in love's grand design SORRENTO] so Capability there was an other landscape lemon tufted hold your breath tumbling down in limestone leaps aquamarine image deepening between the lizard's barely open glance & in the sirens' cheek tall wild flowers sway that cut a rip in your known harmony I rested indifferently striping the butterfly wing fluttering torn below the pale tower creation sleeps away the life to come eddied of human footprints [SAX] where I went next a glistening broken line & hollows scooped by this insistent quest embraced the earth if I hold you my arms frame a prospect so wide Capability cannot remake this place that sun-dial one whit more proximate the model of sight light, clarity & my sense of order no less than the absurd require you fleeting there so I can knit up the lines that lead from clump to sweet honey- -suckle hedge to pool to paving-stones beneath our feet & all the contingent edging life from cracks & fissures against your chosen remit the level pursuit of light if I stay with haifa hand full at your feet the field of stones edging this sandy coastal strip open to common habitation your careful eye weighs its brilliance and replenishes its dour grace a daily purse of praise embellishing my inner sight while the gross eye fattens on its near domestic fare the diastole of a new-placed life may be heard beneath the passing chimes of trains and fans and ice-cream vans swelling into glee so Capability celebrate with me this other sight of wit and verve and brilliancy mass shape distance vacancy no other fealty than the land's own hewn lines & jettisoned in chips & flakes the dross incumbent clarity of our high-skyed being