RUNNING FULL



LAVERNOCK

Last evening of summer -

the caravan park busy -


Devil's Bit Scabious, blackberries,

bright briony beads, old man's beard

     on the cliff


Gleaming slits of water,

silhouette of Sully

nosing out - beach rocks,


smoothed pebbles, rounded bricks,

dry mud crack patterns,

slab strata & fossils -

2 tankers chasing the tide into Cardiff





AUTUMN, SULLY-BARRY

Stinking iris
grinning red,
cliff trees & bushes
wind-shaped

Smell of seaweed,
smell of salt
like a lover's
licked skin

Low tide on
the jumble-slab beach,
fishermen
all in a line

yet each alone
with tripod & line
each bent
to his task

like a lone gull
like that small boat
out on the
misty water

The line like a lover's/licked skin is stolen from Trezza Azzopardi - 'The smell of the
foreshore, of a lover's licked skin', from THE HIDING PLACE, Picador, 2000.





Sunday morning, out to Sully

Sunday morning, out to Sully
in thick mist, down the slipway,
waterworld, heaving seaweed,
anguished screams of unseen shorebirds,
water and sky seamlessly pealescent,
gentle waves forming out of nothing

- the air so still





BOTANISING AT WEST ABERTHAW

On the beach

concrete cubes -

anti-tank defences

           undermined - tilting

at crazy angles -

   and smashed, so you can see

how they were made -

pattern of board shuttering,

concrete on the outside,

large beach stones inside,

angle iron for

reinforcement

- one gashed open, a cave

of herbrobert

Long lines of them,

derailed boxcars boxcars boxcars -

chuffing me off to Dachau

Some you can walk on

like a path -

looks like JARROW

inscribed in one -

anyone alive

who worked on these?

Echoed by haybales

stacked up in the field behind -

rectangles not cottonreels -

the lost summers of WW2

A green tractor with yellow wheels

Ragwort in front of the power station

The beach

lush & barren

shoes & crates & driftwood &

doll limbs

Yarrow in front of the power station

Low sloes

flat to stones

         Thistle, hawkweed, fennel in front of

the power station

& look - there it is,

pink seedhead, white flowers,

Parsley Water Dropwort!





THE OGWR AT OGMORE

Walkers human & canine
mirage-reflections in the wet sand

tide way out
but the river running full

curving course to the beach

oystercatcher flies
downriver

redshank, turnstone

great black-backed gull's
unhurried survey

short, sweet turf
of the saltings*

horses running over
the Merthyr Mawr dunes

*Mary Gillham, SAND DUNES, 1987, p. 4.

Upriver a bit, I'm sure
are (or were) some stepping stones.
There's a white house
on the water's edge
which may be Portobello.

The Via Julia road leading down the dry Pant Marie Flanders Valley in the east to
cross the Ogmore at Broad Ford near Portobello, continued through the dunes to
Newton at that time, but was buried before the end of the Sixteenth Century under
sand 13 feet (4m) deep.
Mary Gillham, SAND DUNES, p. 3.

We almost certainly found the site of the Little West Hotel (now a new block of
flats) on the cliff at Southerndown. The fields of short grass where we gathered
mushrooms for the hotel breakfast, and the stone walls, look exactly as I remember
them from family holidays in the 1950's.

Strangely passive and dream-like and disjointed - that's the film-maker's view of
memory.
(Written after seeing Terence Davies' film DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES.)





MERTHYR MAWR, AFTER RAIN

The Ogwr's running full
over sand & pebble...

Black Rocks
along the beach -
barnacled conglomerate,
tilted pavement,
smoother quartz-streaked limestone.

Up the shingle bank
& into Merthyr Mawr -
dark cloudberries,
dark clouds,
small snails on every stem.

Sand and grasses, sand and
grasses - the first storm
of autumn flooding the hollows,
a chain of lakes
cutting even the higher paths.

Privet bushes in the water,
streams rushing along -
a hint of Ophelia
floating in the meads
but it's flowers of autumn now -

yellow and white,
evening primrose,
eyebright, euphorbia,
ragged ragwort -
a woodpecker gives half a yaffle,

a buzzard cries
over the water,
a grey, coiled adder,
absorbing meagre warmth,
slides, wary, into the undergrowth.

The Ogwr's running full...


© Phil Maillard 2009