In a moment of absence
Walking down to the beach today, I was transported back to this time two years ago, when Wales, like much of the world, fell strangely quiet. Lockdown was in full force, and travel permitted only for essential purposes and only locally. Back then, I had walked home from the beach one day, stood on the overpass over the usually busy A55 and for a good five minutes not seen a single car. Not one car—and yet, just a few months before, whilst walking the same route at dusk and passing an Arts and Crafts cottage that gives to the hills and looks out to the sea, the road had troubled me. I drafted a poem with the lines, “where hills cosset a cottage / you might call home / but for the roar that spills / from a road’s red and white leaving”. The road ruptures — literally (cutting a barren trail through fields, shearing the hills from the sea) and metaphorically (the constant rip, rip of rubber drowning out thought) — I’m no fan of it. And then one day two years ago it fell silent.
Looking upon its four empty lanes, I felt a strong urge to walk down the middle of it. It was so quiet, you could have put your ear to its white lines and felt the tremor from a blackbird’s song. I didn’t walk it, but I walked a lot. Every day. I was lucky—whilst in cities and towns, many people were shut out of parks and stuck indoors, I was able to walk the hills in what was the sunniest springtime in years. When I talk with local people of that strangely quiet and oh-so deadly spring, many of us share the same guilty pleasure. We were living in a peaceful and very small world, and despite the horror of all the deaths and the fear of death, it was in its way a heavenly time. And across the country, people were talking about what really matters in life (family, time, the environment, friends) and of the need to re-set the way we live our lives — to stop the treadmill, to consume less, to respect people and place more. To live in human time. This poem of mine, published in Ink Sweat & Tears in May 2021, speaks of that time.
In a moment of absence
The road whispers
in a language not heard these seventy years
the sea eats only its pebbles
and can be heard calling its kinfolk
who listen can listen
now the sea can be heard
and all the candy floss falls strangely silent
hoping for some tongue some
lips to stir and noise
the blue of this place
which insists once more in singing
the lapwing a curlew’s song