Welsh Journals

LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES, RHONDDA Now, as the great sun goes down like a burning bush And numberless mice peep up at the simple moon, And the light is chameleon in the brittle trees, I stand, collar against the moorland wind, Alone on a nameless ridge above my home, And I see the Valley. I look across at the purple Nyth-bran hills, The broken battlements above Pontypridd, Where Mabon, in his long black coat, shouts from his rock To the ghosts of a thousand miners all around A 'bus begins the long climb into Porth. Two grey women scratch for waste that is forbidden Where the tip spills over the colliery wall, And their children fill a pram with gorse; And an old man stands at his broken garden wall Calling to his pigeons which sweep out over Shabby washing and corrugated iron sheds, And dusty advertisement hoardings, And rubbish tips and television aerials; And the old man standing at his broken garden wall Is a sad proud statue with a secret smile. Empty tins float down the shallow river Under pensioners leaning on the iron bridge Silent and stockstill, staring down into the water, At the sun in the oil and dust below; And a rainbow leaps out of yellow willows Into scum and spray beneath the waterfall. I see shadows of wheels and girders on chapel walls, And a hawthorn by the siding in an aureole of light, And the smoke of brown allotments mixing With red dust from the foundry, rising slowly To mackerels and gulls in the summer sky. The vast night falls on couples in the ferns, The ponies and the bald black sheep, A cool shawl over all shoulders; > And down in the parallel terraces The women sit out windowsills, And men are coming home from pits and factories, And adolescents walk by the coal canal, And kids are playing late in cinder backlanes And below the weir among the tall white grasses; And the old folk sit in their kitchen corners Brooding on the scars of the distant years. Michael Stephens