
A gap now
….
The bridge has been taken away
I told you about the old bridge
that was there before
the bridge that was there before
where
the tin shed cinema stood
keeping its darkness
inside…in.
…
Memory
of…
running from the film …show
running from the… dark
across the …bridge
into the intense colour of the park
I was always running then
I was three.
…
Doctors were paid,
to write “heart failure”,
or heart stopped,
on the death certificate
of miners –
silicosis or pneumoconiosis,
“miners lung,”
inhaled coal dust in plain words
…
were not words
in the doctors vocabulary.
Apparently.
But the doctors were paid
by the mining companies,
so the widows’,
the children,
were not compensated
…
for the loss of a man’s wage,
for living their lives in poverty.
The gap is there.
I am interested
in the space,
the gap
between
and what is unsaid.
…
I am always running.
But never away.
…
©robcullen01012021

…
In February 2019 two days and nights of heavy rain brought a flood that swept through Pontypridd’s celebrated War Memorial Park. Swept away a storage container that builders were using and damaged the Park bridge. That bridge is not the bridge in the foto’s above…that bridge is the bridge I ran out of the tin shed Cinema and crossed into the Park to disappear and keep on running. From what I do not know.
…
It’s funny because for most of my adult life I think of myself as running towards the fire like a fireman, or a policeman. I spent so much of my working life working with the most dangerous, the most damaged, the most…I ran towards…what?…Or was I running away from running away?
…
In the valley — South Wales is a land of valleys — there are always rivers, flood rivers, and when I was a child the rivers ran black. Black from the coal washed in the mines into the rivers. Black as the coal dust in the miners lungs. The rivers run clean today. Everybody says that-followed by remembrances of when the river was black. Except the river is not running clean. It’s filled with plastic thrown in, somewhere up stream, that’s swept down river every time it floods and the plastic and everything else that’s been thrown in litters the river beaches, and hangs from the beautiful trees that line the rivers banks.
…
The river is the living embodiment of the hypocrisy of the generations who love David Attenborough, Greta Schonberg and all the other people trying to save the planet. But the river cries out in the way that only a river can —
FILTH F ILTH FILTH FILTH FILTH…I am defiled.





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