Poet of the Month

January: Rebecca Lowe (Wales).
February: Jim Gronvold (USA). 
March: Carolyn Mary Kleefeld (USA).
April: Tozan Alkan (Turkey).
May: Byron Beynon (Wales).
June: Michelle Chung (USA). 
July: Jim Gwyn (USA).
August: Jonathan Taylor (England).
September: Beata Poźniak (USA).
October: Maria Taylor (England).
November: Stanley H. Barkan (USA).
December: John Dotson (USA).

January: Maria Mastrioti (Greece).

February: Gayl Teller (USA).
March: Mike Jenkins (Wales).
April: Cassian Maria Spiridon (Romania).
May: Simon Fletcher (England)
June: Sultan Catto (USA)
July: Vojislav Deric (Australia)
August: K. S. Moore (Ireland)
September: Kristine Doll (USA)
October: Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan (USA)
November: Christopher Norris (Wales)
December: Maria Mazziotti Gillan (USA)

2023: Poets featured as Poet of the Month 

January: Samuel Ezra (Wales)
February: Tôpher Mills (Wales)
March: Rob Cullen (Wales)
April: Mandira Ghosh (India)
May: John Greening (England)
June: Rosy Wood-Bevan (Wales)
July: David Hughes (Wales)

 

 

Robert Minhinnick is an advisor for and co-founder of  the charity ‘Sustainable Wales/Cymru Gynaliadwy’. He also co-founded Friends of the Earth Cymru.

His writing is published by Carcanet and Seren. Recent publications are ‘Delirium’ (Seren, 2022); ‘Wild Swimming at Scarweather Sands’ (Black Spring, 2023); Menhenet (Clutag, 2023).  Forthcoming from Seventh Quarry is ‘Thrall’, a collaboration with writer and artist, Laura Wainwright.

In 2021 he edited ‘Gorwelion/Shared Horizons’ (Parthian), an anthology about climate change from Wales, Scotland and India, which continues to tour. 

His academic work includes an ongoing assessment of Welsh writer, Duncan Bush.

 

SENTENCES CONSIDERING HOUND’S TONGUE

AT BWLCH Y CARIAD, PORTHCAWL

 

Head Name Undefined Type Unclassified Grid Reference SS 84089 77236 Parish Newton Nottage County Glamorgan When recorded 1898-1908 Primary Source OS 2nd Edition Maps Secondary Source Great Britain 1900 website

 
1.

This flower like a bloodshot eye…
Untidy, I suppose.
Blowsy eruption.  

Out of the sand she comes
where she must return
to these gravel workings  

- a minor industry, years ago, 
where I climb across its scree
and bombsite buddleia -

and now seeming in blossom
yet heavy with reluctant  buds,
yellow within it

while amongst its dirty blue
these vaudevillian reds.
Yes - a flower like a bloodshot eye.

2.

Does hound’s tongue makes me think
of a woman practiced in harlotry? 
Then more fool me.

Possibly a warning 
but to what purpose?
Am I seeking wisdom?

Yet how might flowers be wise?
Maybe this one is.
And how could such a flower warn?

3.

The gypsy’s black language
says a leaf carried beneath the big toe
will heal dog bites.

And true, it smells of dogs
and dog pish. So I kneel in the sand
one June evening and breathe it in.

Yes, here’s both
the woman and my foolishness
in approaching someone

precarious on a bar room stool,
yet the whole world rooted
through her bloodshot eye…

 (c) 2024 Robert Minhinnick

ALL  SAINTS

My mother told a story about her sister’s marriage
and how she walked out amongst the guests
on to the yellow cobbles of All Saints.

There, she heard music she thought was bells
but slowly realised it was icicles
chiming on the hem of her bridesmaid’s dress
as she stepped through the midday snow.

(c) 2024 Robert Minhinnick

BURNING A MASTERPIECE

1.

Three dry weeks after two wet months
and because we have recycled so much

the only paper is the magazine
that comes three times a year and for which I pay,

and today the matches strike and the allotment bonfire
starts to leak smoke after I light

the first pages - easier
than burning books, I think .

2.

And it’s the adverts that scorch first

earth, art and female protest
David Hockney a collection of rarely seen drawings

and ice in the rain barrels and no-one around,
only two crows bickering over a dead knight

and a wren with its shrew-like voice
and there is already ash in circlets of frost

and an electric car silent as a ghost
disappearing into the mist.

3.

When I come home my hair and clothes
are smelling of December sunflowers

- their crowns like dead babies’ faces -
my tinder of trimmed raspberry canes,

and that primeval cavemouth smoke
where storytelling was born:

sweat and piss  and shit and birth
and the wrinkling headlines

The multilayered culture of Myanmar

Owning the figurative space

and the ash of art laid out in soft moraines.

(c) 2024 Robert Minhinnick

REGULARS: Part 2

For the first time she really looks at the room:
maybe the Malster’s lounge
retains some ruined grandeur,
yet on this saturated afternoon
= the clock now says twenty to four
but she’s unsure if it works –
another round might be an idea.
But that would be pushing it.

The light consists of mote-filled beams
over every surface and there seems
a sheen of old gold in the air.

And who knows whether that man
in the corner is a ghost
or how many boots have rested on the bar foot rail,
itself a dinted and ancient gilt.

And for some reason
this young woman is sipping tequila beer
(whoever first thought of that must now be a billionaire)
which she knows was not
her first answer to the afternoon.
But perhaps it is now.

Because while the cue ball circulates
surely Wednesday has not yet
wrung itself out, and she might still
count her haiku’s syllables
and find how similar
is the chink of glass
to the white’s
impermissible kiss
on the red.

(Pontypridd. April 10, 2024)

(c) 2024 Robert Minhhinnick

SWIFTS IN MAY

Blue evening sun
then seven swifts over the house,
seven wall-creepers, seven air climbers.

Once I picked a swift out of the gutter.
What brought you down? I asked of that swift.
As if I could not have guessed.

And now we study swifts,
talk of swift-bricks, promote, advertise,
speak of unceasing swifts against a ceaseless tide.

Our town is a swift sanctuary
and that swift’s heart still races inside my hand,
a story I do not tell

all the good grey-haired people
studying swiftology, brick
by hollow brick, building their science.

Yet every second week in May
I expect to hear swifts’ screams lacerate the air,
even when no swift has returned,

and I recall
that  once I picked a swift out of this road,
fragile as a pressed flower.

(c) 2024 Robert Minhinnick

THE ATOMSMASHER

(After a presentation by Lyn Evans at the Science Café, Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea, September 2012).

1.

Soon it’s all going to be science fiction.
Let me tell you how:
tomorrow will be today

and Lyn Evans will find himself in the next
dimension as easily as leaving a room.
Yes, I can promise you that: science fiction:

Lyn Evans smashing the atoms,
so we can all find out.

2.

The garden too quiet.
That type of silence
when the sparrowhawk descends.

There it is,
its breast barred:
sandstone and quartz.

Not a voice, not a vowel.
But the type of silence
when a sparrowhawk comes down.

The baleful bird.

3.

aubergine flower
purple to black
from a pavement crack
as the earth moves 
nightflower I’d say black
stem and black sap
a judge’s black cap

4.

Lyn Evans told us dark energy fills space.
And Lyn Evans is home
after annihilating atoms
in Switzerland.

I loved Lyn Evans’s cyclonic mind.
But he failed to make his computer work.
So why doesn’t he turnback time? a voice behind me asked.

5.

And I thought of the anti-
orchid anti-purple out
of anti-earth the anti
God who put the particles
together and apart. 
Maybe it doesn’t work like that.
And maybe it does.

6.

Salute Lyn Evans, thunderbolt on his costume.
Yes, Lyn the atom-smasher
who could not make his computer work.
But one day he will turn back time…
Only the software will be different.

PS.

(I understand that time is many mansions.
But is that why Dr Lyn Evans
keeps leaving the room?)

(c) 2024 Robert Minhinnick