Some twenty years back, having left a steady job in Aberystwyth to do a PhD (which I in turn left) I got work in Liverpool. At the time I was living in Taliesin, Ceredigion, on the West Wales coast, and for a while I used to travel up to Liverpool on a Sunday night and then back home again on a Friday evening. The road I took twisted through mountain passes, above silvered lakes, over empty moors until some two hours later, it hit a dual carriageway and thereafter went downhill. Invariably, a little into the journey, poems would start working their way into my head and by the time I got to Rhydymain I’d have to pull over and start scribbling them down before I lost the lines. I wrote a good many poems this way and thought of them, in my pompous moments, as my Rhydymain Poems. My pomposity stopped short of trying to get any of them published as I had then given up thoughts of being a poet and was fully absorbed in teaching at university. From time to time I remember lines from these poems and revisit them, and today I thought to ‘publish’ a couple of them here.

Having accumulated boxes of poems over the years — some of which I hold to be very good, and others to be terrible — I often wonder at all of the art that people make and which rarely, if ever, sees the light of day. Every so often, a Keith Cunningham, a Ron Gittens, an Agnes Martin pops up: an artist who withdraws from the art world but continues to paint for thirty, forty, fifty years and whose work becomes visible only upon their death. More often than not though, what is hidden remains hidden and I imagine that this is particularly so with poetry. There must be so many wonderful poets out there in the world who, for one reason or another, do not want to publish their work (or who are unable to find publication for it), and whose work as a consequence lies buried in files and drawers until their death when, at best, it is held onto by a loved one for sentimental value alone… for a while. And there must be so much good work too, that is binned or burnt by an artist in their lifetime, the lines of which remain only in the artist’s head until they, like the head, become ether. In as much as we know a bit about what lives near the surface of the sea and near nothing of its deeps, it is a shame that oftentimes what we know of people and of their acts is noise, and in that noise so little of the magic of so many people is seen.

And so, two Rhydymain poems — neither of which are great poems, but both of which may, I hope, offer points of recognition, and generate perhaps a thought, a smile somewhere.

Two

(For Morien)

Da—
dee?

Da-deeeeeeeeee
what you been doing Daddy?

I’ve been teaching, Pudding

I’ve been teaching too
his nappied voice echoes down the line

and I smile across the houses
moors and mountains between us
as he goes off to work at jigsaws
singing songs of sheep

Emigre laments

to coal smoke in the still moist air
your green and sheep-shorn limbs

to skies that slip and bleed on mountains
the coming evening mists

to slow waves and winter seaweed
ache of pebbles on an ebbing tide

my body says goodbye

come now cold steel and glass of cities
your puddled piss and pavements

bring starless nights to scar my sight
and brutalise my sighs

I am yours now for your pennies
undressed eyes open wide