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)

2025: Poets featured as Poet of the Month 
January: Annest Gwilym (Wales)
February: Sam Smith (Wales)

 

 MARCH POET OF THE MONTH:
DAVE LEWIS (WALES)


Dave Lewis (c) Photo 2025 Dave Lewis

Dave Lewis is a writer, poet and photographer from Cilfynydd. He read zoology at Cardiff University, taught biology in Kenya and loves to travel. He runs the International Welsh Poetry Competition and the Poetry Book Awards. His epic poem, Roadkill, outlines the class struggle, while his collection, Going Off Grid, warns of the dangers of digital capitalism. His latest release, Algorithm, dips into AI, war, nature, race, love and travel. He has produced a crime thriller trilogy and the highly-acclaimed novel, The Welsh Man. He likes dogs, elephants and real ale.

www.david-lewis.co.uk

 

The mudcrawlers

‘The skippers of those Newport ships
would be working for NGOs today.’
Rainbow heads were nodding –
our self-coagulated melting pot,
loitering at dusk on the terrace
of the Africa Hotel, Stone Town, Zanzibar.
I’m sipping beer between Burton brawls
and iPad news from Europe.
‘Aye, those wretched mudcrawlers,
fleeing the famine in Ireland,
and have you guys not seen that film
- Black 47 - really good movie?’
A redhead girl points out that
those immigrants were starving
and they brought their women
and children with them too.
Rebellion is quickly quashed
as the TV screen screams an answer in real time -
a photograph of a dead toddler
on a European beach.
/   S h u s h   f o r   a   s e c o n d…   /
‘Yep, even today the Usk
can throw up bones from the past -
the crushed skull of a gypsy lass,
the mangled femur of a child.’
Meanwhile on another embankment,
Buddha-fat politicians are dining
on pork medallions as rain outside
slowly drizzles down like cider, cream
and mustard. Life and death decisions
are casually clicked between courses.
‘After all we must keep our borders
safe from the Berber hordes!’
The sun has set now on the Indian Ocean.
Some of us order again, determined
to push on through the mud
of our own personal mosquito nights.

(c) 2025 Dave Lewis

Lorca

Did you arouse the sunset over the Alhambra
before the soft triggers were pulled?
Did you recall your piano scales
or the music of your early verses?
Did you wish to be back in the land of castles
or yearn to be filmed on Dali’s rocks?
And tell me about the Generation of ’27,
when innocent blue became deviant green.
Sing to me in gypsy ballads and Cubist dreams
about the vicious power of love and death.
In those brief days of imprisonment
did the guards allow you time to look around?
Maybe you saw a cockroach make love to a butterfly.
Perhaps they listened to you tell tall tales
of New York City, Havana and Buenos Aires.
Did they learn of your love for theatre,
of Moorish culture and the rehumanisation of poetry
or did your sorrow finally overcome joy,
did isolation, depression and alienation
destroy the songs and the sketches in your heart?
And was it exactly five in the afternoon
when you twirled round and round,
proud like flamenco when the bullets hit?

(c) 2025 Dave Lewis

Carrying The Dead

We had to walk
over the gold of someone
else's lost summer,
between the trees
of Windsor Place,
playing Russian roulette
with the girl I loved,
heads and tails,
left or right,
past Eglwys Dewi Sant,
sometimes the train
to Penarth or the beach
at Barry, the bus
to St Fagans,
we sucked O two
from beech giants,
cold outside the Plymouth,
me young,
so young
but you didn't know that,
you missed that,
laying low with rum
and weak beer
in the Angel dungeon,
insensitivity wasted
on innocence
but no excuses,
especially not now,
not while the phantoms
are out to lunch,
and now,
everytime I taste
old London town,
hidden down
Bloomsbury
of all places,
an old Dylan haunt,
just sand in time now,
wind blowing,
wind howling.

(c) 2025 Dave Lewis

Tangier Sunday, Feb '23

take the steps past Popeye's
sneak in through a smaller gate
reel yourself to Tingis
mint tea in Petit Socco
grab some strawberries,
some soap and cinnamon
stop off at Café Baba
shoot the shit for a random hour
feel the sun creep down the walls
meet friends outside the Rif
then stroll back to Gran Paris
after coffee grab a jumper
first beer in La Coeur
pick at tapas, crunchy whitebait
a livener at the Hole in the Wall
meet smiley Zee in Carousel
terminate in Bar Number One
two hours into Monday
there's Fouad, who's with Abdellatif
flick through phones
wonder at the latest vision
forensics of interzone
blood oil thick on canvas
hear the story about Omar Sharif
talk poetry with Youssef
before the train to Rabat
teasing about last night's absence
'Sue boogied with Mr Big, man!'
we had seared tuna and wine
walking home we wondered
if the beat would stay
we even wrote you a note
left with the barmaid in the London
write me, promise?
we need to keep you close

(c) 2025 Dave Lewis

Alone in The Raven

you've left now, I am alone.
Beer warm now, I window shop.
A hippie cycles by, her purple dress
flurries behind, exposing,
for just a moment,
her blushing thighs
and a tattoo of a cherry.

She passes the Roman baths
meanders through tourists.
I wonder what’s in her basket;
biscuits to dip in her tea,
a kilo of happy leaves,
new sketches and poems,
my things to burn.

(c) 2025 Dave Lewis

Arthur

I always loved our visits to my uncle’s garage,
the rows of spanners hanging from the wall
like shiny metal soldiers
stood to attention, awaiting the call
to engine battle from the general
with the oil-stained blue velvet cap
as he smoked a pipe and played Rachmaninov
on a beat-up old cassette player.
I’d listen to the men chat about Nijinsky,
‘Aye, 11/8 he was see, incredible animal…’
as they sipped coffee laced with thick Fussels milk
and peaty whisky from Speyside.
Arthur’s days were spent relaxing,
head under a bonnet, fixing, sighing, inventing,
humming and smiling, while at night
he read Yevtushenko and Voznesensky
alone by a lamp. He also carved wood,
that he’d collected while out walking by the brook,
his mongrel bordering him, ignorant of how cold
a Russian winter could be.
As I grew older and began drinking too,
I would see his light still on,
late into the early hours he would pace
the prison of his living room.
I still liked to visit. It was always quiet
apart from the old dog’s snoring,
the occasional chime, Beethoven
or the odd remark about the weather
reverberating through the longest seconds
of my own warmongering youth.
He didn’t speak much about the convoys
or the snow flying across the waves.
Dad said he was broken but I saw a warrior
who’d seen the wind. I think he carried on
because that’s what the dead told him to do.
And he’d do exactly that until their shadows
finally dissolved from those endless woods.

(c) 2025 Dave Lewis

#AndMe

For SP

Fragile one.
You held up a mirror in your unsteady hand.
Remember.
You were betrayed by women as well as that man.
Doctors & nurses.
Took your clothes and feelings, gave you electricity.
Dylan.
Didn’t leave the Chelsea Hotel on purpose you know.
Magic.
Although it doesn’t exist it was always worth a try I suppose.
Artists.
Clothed your doubts with beauty and creativity.
Post natal.
Best cured with fast cars and icy rivers?
Darkness.
Always a very welcome guest in your house.
Sexton said.
That she burned to live the same way.
Distorted.
Through a lens, colour is often disorderly.
Confess your sins.
Hold them up to the light for all to see.
Peace.
Like a ship in a bottle yes, but adrift now, free on the sea.

(c) 2025 Dave Lewis

Chokora

Beware the 60,000 glue boys, they warned us before we headed into town. They’ll throw their own shit at you and laugh, high on petrol, fast as rats. Waking up on Christmas Day wrapped in yesterday’s news with the print coming off on their faces you could read all about government corruption if you held their HIV-ravaged frames up to a mirror. They start the day drinking from a storm drain where mosquitos lay their eggs and squint in the bright light of another perfect Nairobi day. The sun is hot at this time of year, so it’s off to the market to steal fruit, collect garbage in a dirty sack, sell it for a few shillings, buy solvents from Biashara Street. Decisions, decisions? Sometimes the police will beat them with canes. Sometimes they just get sodomised. Mostly they are just ignored. Hopping through the streets like impalas evading the cheetah’s dew claw - at ten or eleven they begin raping whoever they can catch. The exploited become the exploiters before moving into the safety of gangs. With bloodshot eyes they’re hypnotised by the spirits of the devil night that dance around the flickering flames, darting in and out of bodies that are both hot and cold as they hug the dustbin fire until the next beautiful ruddy dawn. And if you were to walk down Juja Road, they’d descend like ants upon a discarded pawpaw and you’d feel your pockets turned inside out as you inhale the sewerage scent and urine breeze before running, running, running from children who are only hungry for love, who want only to escape the green harvest of bhang and the fear of being guarded by mbwa kali until they finally succumb, average age 24, bruised skeletons with yeast tongues dying in an excrement-flavoured gutter with jagged rubble for an ICU bed.

(c) 2025 Dave Lewis

Notes

The mudcrawlers

In the mid 19th Century many starving families left Ireland to escape the famine. Many got ships to Newport, Wales but as numbers increased it was soon made illegal. Sympathetic ship owners took pity and rather than return their human cargo to Cork they allowed them to jump ship and risk the tidal River Usk. Many drowned but some managed to crawl through the mud to shore. Not everyone made it and body parts are still found in the sludge, even today.


Lorca

‘arouse’ to mean stir up/awaken – to wake up the world to discrimination.
Lorca befriended Luis Buñuel Portolés (the great filmmaker) and Salvador Dali (artist).
‘Generation ’27’ – a group of avant-garde artists.
‘green’ – from ‘The Sleepwalking Ballad’.
‘cockroach’/‘butterfly’ – from his first play ‘The Butterfly’s Evil Spell’.
‘exactly five in the afternoon’ – from ‘Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías’.


Tangier Sunday, Feb '23
‘Popeye’s’ – famous fish restaurant in Tangier.
‘Café Baba’ – café made famous by Rolling Stones and others.
‘Rif’ – old cinema.
‘Gran Paris’ – famous café (featured in the Jason Bourne film).

#AndMe
Observations on Sylvia Plath’s life and influences.


Chokora

Nairobi’s street children are branded ‘chokora’ or scavengers. The number of street children could be as high as between 250,000 and 300,000 throughout Kenya, including 60,000 in Nairobi alone.

A United Nations report (1998) found evidence of organised networks of sexual exploitation of children in rich, private houses known as ‘Mbwa kali’, which refers to the ‘Beware of fierce dog’ signs posted outside the gates. It is suspected that in many private houses illegal activities involving children are taking place but access by law enforcement officials on mere grounds of suspicion is not allowed and police are wary to enter. Therefore, any activities inside ‘Mbwa kali’ houses, mainly owned by rich Kenyans, expatriates and foreigners, are very difficult to control.

‘Bhang’ – marijuana
Average life expectancy for street children is 24.