As a child, I spent many summer holidays – with my siblings and parents – staying in the Welsh mountains around Snowdonia.
Memories, feelings, images and vibes seep into you, get into your bones, under your skin and permeate the soul.
If there’s a spiritual home for me, maybe it’s those hills, maybe it’s those valleys and flatlands by the coast.
Maybe it’s the cliffs and the slate mines, the cottages and the dripping woods, the dark stone buildings and the magic.
The magic – buckets of it.
Pure, Welsh fire – the blood of Dragons is seeped into those hills and you can feel it in your bones.
That’s my Wales, my childhood memories of studying the mosses in and on the dry stone walls as rain drips into my eyes.
Staring out over the valleys, from window ledges set deep in stone walls – dry, warm, quiet and alone – as the rain spatters the pane running rivulets of boredom-conquering fascination.
I learnt myself in those quiet days.
And I remember the lessons.
Suffice to say I loved it there.
And this poem – although entirely fictional – is based in that well.
Is based in Dragon fire and gorgeously bleak cloudy skies helping the hills tuck in to sleep in dim-day twilight.
So I hope you like this poem.
The House
The Valley of the house hides the river
Rushing mountain-chunk-smashing water
Down from the peaks into the up
Of the valley hanging over the plains below the mountain.
The valley of the house channels the gale
To rip hatred at the rock-huggared walls
Of the slate-roofed scribing house
Of the resider, the last abider of the upland home
Held nestle-caught in the womb of the mountain hustle.
Dim in the moonless night
Window-lit warmth defies
The squalled-rain smash battalions,
Electric in their storm-lit night
Drenching doors fit tight: seamless oak
Iron-hinged, deadlocked, bolted safe
And solid glory-revel in wind resistance,
Water impermissance; shutting out the night.
Spatter maniacs: rain taken life,
Murmurate in chaos wheels
Intent, dedicated, committed and born for the sting-lash
Drives at skin, sod, bush, air and the night
Casting running river-water fizz-frenzy-ripped
As water pours off the valley-making mountains
Guard-watching the weather-night
To tell the day the story the moon saw in absentia,
The house saw watching unmoved and unriled
At nature’s attempt to shift a shingle,
Rattle a latch, blow-out a candle;
But, really, ultimately, unsurpassingly
Blow the resider’s creation from the outside
In to smithereened rock the rain could weather
To the sand that’s washed, to lie on the distant beaches,
Bang-spumed, wash-tossed and surf demented
To insignificant nothing
In nature’s own, sweet time.
And the house stands guard beside the river,
The house stands guard beside the brook
That spills the bank
That cannot withstand the flood
That flashes in the night
That heaven fell in clouds,
Spatter-maniacs revelling,
Wind-fingers pulling,
Lash-gusts gripping at the brush
Of the moor-floor valley-bed,
The soil-poor rocky bed,
The river’s sole and only flooding bed,
And the brook that burst the bank
That guards the house from the pull
Of the rush of the river
Become unchanneled
In the rain that Hell called down.
And our resider, the one-love provider,
Resumes the tale from the plume that’s nibbed
Upon the tome that reads the life
That’s lived upon the valley
That is the tomb of the long-lost raider,
The ever-travelling jader
Of the worst that life can offer,
The worst seen by the legendary beholder,
The worst that is the nature of the human’s grave intention,
The human’s last adventure
Documented in the house that hopes
The storm will end;
The house that hopes the plume won’t bend
Until the last of the word that is the real is penned
Upon the pages never turned bar for one –
The source, the font, the ever-loved: resider.
