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)

 

 

Special Issue Tuesday Poetry Group/Photos of covers (c) Peter Thabit Jones

The July’s Poet of the Month is something different to the usual single poet.
The poems featured are by Swansea’s Tuesday Poetry Group, which formed in May 2009. They publish annual anthologies of their poetry and the proceeds go to local charities, including Ty Hafan Children’s Hospice Sully the Alzheimer Society.
The single poet feature will continue with August's Poet of the Month.

 

To Meet J. S. Bach
“If ever I am worthy enough . . . ” (T. G. Thomas ~  Musician)

There is often a small, spoken phrase
that enables us to peep into a person’s soul . . .
Besides meeting my loved ones again, he said,
I would like to meet up with the great J.S. Bach . . .

A surprise statement over morning coffee
at Bistro Pierre on Oyster Wharf.
. . . To walk with him and talk with him

to know how he managed to create
manifold and magnificent compositions,
to hear his music echo through the golden ways,
to listen, eternally, to his music in High Heaven . . .

The tide in full flow in Swansea Bay:
tireless waves sang of rhythm, every movement
of vital value, sound with endless energy,
beauty abounding as the land reached the sea,
enriched by the master of counterpoint;
the chain that binds all form and texture
interlinking, blending disbursing his gifts
with instrumental and human voice.

He remembered the words of Tovey...
As the great composers are like mighty rivers,
they all flow into the mighty ocean, which is Bach.

Here was a man worthy of a place in Heaven.
Reaching for Perfection!

Jean Salkilld 

Starbirth

Over the field the stars are forming.
New each night they push through
The dream nebula haloed with dust.

Horizoned in light the world’s edge
Slips the sun into Australia.
Constellations plough the sky; Orion hunts;
And Cassiopeia boasts her beauty in five bright points.

Moonside out, the heavens call as
Earthbound we burn, burst, scatter
Like good seed and grow, on the land,
Gazing upward, drawn, dragged, drugged, disbelieving,
Digging for poems in the root of a star.

Gillian Drake

Patricia Reminiscing

“Yes, I knew Dylan Thomas darling.
Come, let’s sit in the garden in the sun
We’ve seen so little of it of late.”
And in the swing chair’s soft cushions we sat
Warmed by the noon sun over Caswell Bay.

“They used to visit us in London, darling,
With their friends, you know.  He was very quiet.”
We watched the children playing on the beach
And in and out of the wavelets breaking
On the sand, their parents strolling bare foot.

“And, of course, they had this place in Laugharne,
‘The Boathouse’ it was called, I remember.
We used to go and stay with them, darling.
And we’d all go up to that hotel there,
Browns, you know, but he never said anything.

But you know, he was very quiet, darling.
Very quiet darling, he never said a word.”
We watched the sun move over the high roof,
And the young men in their flat kayaks come in
And hand in their paddles to the Life Guard.

Margaret Duguid

Schrodinger’s Kitchen

The sun is pinned to the kitchen walls,
its beam stretching from skirting to ceiling.
Held together by time spent in a room
that soothes the scythe of the outside.
Afternoon.  Locked in with my auntie’s cat, battling her ninth life. She slowly
weaves between my legs, as I coax her with treats she’s beginning to leave. 

In this sunshine box I begin to think of her
as a cat fit for Schrodinger.
And I, neither here nor there, exist
in a space of my own making.
The yellow paint caressed these walls
when this house bristled with a different life.
Five senses fixed to the living that breathed
within these rooms.

Now the sixth exists on the periphery.
Waiting for a woman and an elderly cat
to drift into the gap, taking me back and beyond.
This simple kitchen, with sunshine walls,
engages memory with something else that begins to call.

Ceri Thomas

Those days

No birds will come this spring to flit along
her branches, no nuthatch upside down and
crazy, cleopatra-eyed, crack, crack
on seeds it wedges in the old pine’s bark,
no woodpecker, a hammer for a beak
to drum a message deep into the core,
no long-tailed tits to dash from bough to bough
and party in the glitz of evergreen.

Those days are gone.  The woodsmen came to make
their claim, explaining how the winds would come
and bring her down, a danger to our home.
Top branches first, and then the rest. I heard
the groan, watched as her crown came tumbling down,
and tears of sawdust spattered on the ground.

Jean James

My mother was a housemaid (mid 1920s)

My mother was a housemaid,
not a ballerina.
She wore a plain dark dress,
not a tutu or a ballet skirt
filled with diaphanous layers
of tulle or silk.

The closest she ever came     
to standing en pointe
was when balancing
on tip-toe
to whisk away dust and dirt
or the intricate lace
of a spider’s web
from the top of picture rail                    
or pelmet                                            
in the grand house where she worked.

Each morning she’d rake cinders and ash
from the household grates
before blackleading the bars;            
help strip and make the beds,     
scrub clothes, scour steps,
beat carpets or mop floors.

And at the end of the day
she’d receive no bouquet of flowers
or rapturous applause      
for a brilliant pirouette, an arabesque
or her part in a pas de deux,
but on finishing her chores,
quietly climb in candlelight
the steps to her attic room,
never knowing that each night
in her sleep                            
she’d be nearer to the stars.    

Brett Hayes

Hiraeth

Home is a mind place,
a place of woods and water,
some in ponds,
where we lay on our bellies
and studied the habits
of salamanders and frogs
and skated in the winter.

Home is where we gathered
for meals and celebrations,
where morals were taught
and habits ingrained.

Home is mother and father,
siblings and other rivals,
grandparents, cousins and aunts.

Home is the companions of childhood,
the family pets,
Gretchen the boxer
and a series of cats,
adventures in the city
a train ride away,
and long drawn summers
sailing to the beach

Home is blue and green
of sky and watered lawns
and white when waking
to frost on the windows,
the world a powder puff of snow.

Home is a mind place.
it resides in synapses
of triggered memories
visited in quiet
at the turning of a page,
a yellowed photo in an album,
a ghostly face, squinting at a lens
in a place out of focus, the face of home.

Ann Cooke

Sketching

At rocky, remote Strumble Head,
She’d talk to anyone or everyone;
Sitting sketching attracts the stranger.
She lays down her laws, digits wagging,
Counting off the points she makes –
Arms raised, backwards leaning,
Laughing at the seagulls,
Hands spread abroad, merry to the skies –
Blue heavens listen, glistening horizons;
Gulls dive to the basking seals below
In their cove, sunning the rocky shore
A pup splashes its fishy seaweed pools
Its yawning mother, summer blubber filled,
Rolls lazily on this sun-drenched late September Day
The bay fishermen up nets to pass the light at Strumble Head
As I too try to sketch
In words.

Ll. Hugh Nicholas