October 2017 – Page 2

Where are where we were…no surprises!

Posted on October 20, 2017 by celfypridd

Memories of Vigils

Listening to Rachmaninov’s Vespers at Christmas

brought you back into my thoughts from those days

when you were fifteen and expecting your first child.

And you were too frightened to fall asleep

so I sat with you and whiled away the night hours,

playing cards and telling you those old stories.

Night after night from December through to March

of what it was like to grow up in the village as a child

and as we talked the boys would slide into your room

Instead of prowling the streets and alleys like wolves

blowing their heads off with petrol, gas and glue,

and they listened too and laughed as I told you

Of places I’d been to and those Manhattans night views,

of exploring the walkways and hidden stairs and floors

of Grand Central Station New York in the early hours explorations

Of that quiet time before dawn when the night crew

sat around yawning or folded asleep at their desks.

The crazy stories of the village and old Digger Young

And his fight to get away from the awakening dead.

And the boys soon fell asleep on the floor but you

sat up wanting more of those childhood stories .

More of the kind that made you laugh you said.

And you told me your stories too, of North Wales

and the homes and what you had been through.

And you cried now and then. And asked do you

believe me? Do you believe what I’ve said they did?

And I told you I did. I believed you. You cried again.

And then you said quietly I think I can sleep now.

And then one night you looked at me and said

I must be bad for those men to treat me like that

In the way that they did. And you asked me

Do you think I’m bad? I mean really bad?

Is there a sign on my head that says about me

Anyone can do whatever they want with me.

I told you that there are bad men and yes

they do bad things and they did that to you.

But what they did didn’t make you bad at all.

It says more about them than it says about you.

And then you told your story over and over again

To the social workers, their managers and the police.

And they decided you and the rest were just lying

And through the nights that followed I listened

To your anger and the pain of feeling betrayed again

and again and again and again and again and again.

Years later you wrote a letter saying you remembered.

Succour

Posted on October 19, 2017 by celfypridd

Succumbing to the succour that poetry allows

rain falls and pain empties ….

eddying always as it flows.

Bout

Posted on October 19, 2017 by celfypridd

An SOS from the frontier.

This is a message from the borderlands

an endless void a windswept land

it is a desert stripped bare of features.

So I whisper the message – If you could have heard

all that I’ve heard. If you could see all that I’ve seen

if you could have been there, far out there and if you

could have listened to peoples words, listened to those

broken hurting people and that place out there, in here,

in me, in you. The dark frontier, that secret place you know

I know, we know, we all know, but deny its existence.

But for me there is no choice. I cannot deny its imprint

on my mind, my memory is not blind, deaf or unfeeling.

But I wish sometimes that it might be so. Now what do I do

with these memories, the words I do not wish to store,

and hold like some mad treasure trove, archive of horrors

of mankind, of humankind the stories told and told again,

The faces change but the pain and fear, the words remain.

It’s unending, it’s our narrative as long as we survive

this story will evolve and grow for we are humans.

I worked amongst the desolation, fragments,

survivors, of lives that might have flowered.

And that endless unknowing of what might have been

of who would I have been if that had not been done

to me, to who I was, a child, and unsuspecting.

Imagine the innocence and the quiet trust.

And all that time of working to heal – denial.

A total blindness to the reality of the harm

being done to children everywhere you look.

It’s a reality, take a bus or a train, sit in a café

you will be close to someone who has survived.

And then the guaranteed denial that fact is fact

In the face of all that. And then that sound

of wheels within wheels grinding, the noise

of conversations and the deals in closed rooms

to keep silence, to protect the perpetrators

and prevent the door room from being opened

and the truth from being known and shared.

Forty years of denial, obstruction and frustration.

Our lives are brief, a mere fluttering in time.

So open the door wide and let the light in!

From Rob Cullen’s collection “Uncertain Times” published September 2016 Octavo Press.

Coronation Day 2nd June 1953

Posted on October 19, 2017October 19, 2017 by celfypridd

Thundering and lightning crackled without warning in clear blue skies

the silenced old gods and wise men left only indentations, remembrances

Of psalms and words in the places they’d once stood in so many guises.

In the tall aspen trees above the school yard Jackdaws turned into blackness

©RobCullen2017

Sarajevo

Posted on October 19, 2017 by celfypridd

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTvhR0lEtZM&list=RDZTvhR0lEtZM&t=16

Love song to Sarajevo.

A love song should be sung with joy not shame

Yes a love song should be sung with joy

But it is with shame that I write

A love song to Sarajevo.

I hear of the deaths and the blood spilled

And the killing goes on and on and on