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VoicesontheBridge is organised by Rob Cullen.

VoicesontheBridge…What a great night, a great reading and a great venue!

Many thanks to all the poets reading Stephanie McNicholas, Des Mannay, Pete Akinwunmi, Ben Wildsmith, Nicholas McGaughey, Susie Wild – Exceptional!

Many thanks to the audience!

And lastly many thanks to Jeff and Storyville Books

We shall start planning for a VoicesontheBridge in September –

Many thanks again all!

Rob Cullen

…

I walked past the bench today on the old pathway

a place we’d sit surrounded by woodland’s stretches

Where I’d listened to you talk of Poland before the war

…

Of the Germans, Auschwitz and you as a teenage boy

delivering bread from your father’s bakery

to the Waffen SS barracks I remembered in sepia tones

…

Photographs only. And you’d lose some loaves behind

the wire fences – no more words, no more details.

you did what was needed to be done. No questions.

…

What else could you do. Nothing more to say

The old bench is falling away now, the pathway a mire

of boot marks washed in black mud by the rains

…

constant falling and your days my dear Stanislaus

are getting forgotten too. Are you listening to the way the rain

is falling again today. And so with thoughts of you  I walk through

…

the heavy leafed trees weighed by the gathering rain

I’m lucky I’ve been surrounded by people like you

who through their actions mattered, your words of kindness too

…

Remembering you  I often wonder how your fathers bread tasted,

how it smelled in that place where burning flesh consumed the air

where burning human flesh and the violence could not be ignored.

…

And as you told me once silence kills – imagine a life with that?

Stanislaus Pipkin was originally from Poland. His father a baker

was forced to supply bread to the SS Barracks in Auschwitz

…

Concentration Extermination camp. Stanislaus as a teenager

helped his father by delivering bread to the barracks.

He also gave bread to the inmates although to do so

…

meant certain execution if discovered. Stanislaus

didn’t talk much about his activities.

After the war Poland was overran by Soviet forces

…

 and Stanislaus was eventually forced to escape to Britain.

He came to live in Wales where he worked in the mines.

He married, raised a family in Pontypridd.

…

When the communists were ousted from Poland

Stanislaus was able to return free from the fear

of reprisal for his activities.

…

Stanislaus Pipkin was honoured by Poland as a National Hero.

©robcullen30062020

Voices on the Bridge Thursday 7th July at 6.00pm @Storyville Books Pontypridd- Line-up confirmed…Stephanie McNicholas, Des Mannay, Pete Akinwunmi, Ben Wildsmith, Nicholas McGaughey, Susie Wild and yours truly Rob Cullen presenting and reading. Let me know if you’d like to read in the openmic.

Bio’s

Stephanie McNicholas trained as a journalist in Cardiff in the 1980s and went on to write for national and regional newspapers and magazines. Steph published her second book – WHEN PONTY ROCKED! – in 2021. It tells the stories of the many musicians from her home town in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.

Pete Akinwunmi is the vocalist and songwriter with the band TaffyWasAThief. Poetry writing developed from lyric writing resulting in narrative poetry combined with the urge to entertain. Brought up in care in 1950’s/60’s Aberdare, South-Wales as the only black person in the Cynon Valley has provided a distinct and unique view of his homeland.

Nicholas McGaughey lives in Pontypridd. He has new work in Bad Lilies/Stand/Lucent Dreaming/The Friday Poem and Spelt Magazine.

Susie Wild is author of the poetry collections Windfalls and Better Houses, the short story collection The Art of Contraception listed for the Edge Hill Prize, and the novella Arrivals. Her work has recently featured in Carol Ann Duffy’s pandemic project WRITE Where We Are NOW, The Atlanta Review, Ink, Sweat & Tears and Poetry Wales. She has placed in competitions including the Welshpool Poetry Festival Competition, the Prole Laureate Prize and the Mslexia Women’s Poetry Competition and performed at festivals including The Laugharne Weekend, Green Man and Glastonbury.

Ben Wildsmith was born in Birmingham at an early age and began crawling westwards immediately. He is a songwriter, journalist, support worker and anarcho-syndicalist carbuncle on the body politic. He is a Literature Wales bursary recipient and Hay Festival Writer at Work. You can read him each Sunday in Nation Cymru.

Des Mannay is a Disabled, Welsh writer of colour. Poetry collection, “Sod ’em – and tomorrow” (Waterloo Press). Co-editor ‘The Angry Manifesto’ journal. Prize-winner in 4 competitions, shortlisted in 7. Performed at many venues/festivals, in numerous poetry journals, 36 anthologies. Judge in ‘Valiant Scribe’ competition.

Rob Cullen has organised VOB since 2017. He is a gardener, environmentalist, poet, writer, artist. Throughout lockdown he has been frequently published in Resistance Poetry, & also The Lark, US – Plus The Atlanta Poetry Review; Culture Matters anthologies Ymlaen/Onward & Gwrthryfel/Uprising & A Fish Rots from the Head as well as “The Learned Pig” Arts Journal, Cambridge, UK. Rob’s work regularly appears in the Red Poets annuals. He’s completed two novels.

See you at VoicesontheBridge!

Stephen Payne is unable to read due to potential Covid infection. Pete Akinwunmi has agreed to stand in for Stephen.

Voices on the Bridge Thursday 7th July at 6.00pm @Storyville Books Pontypridd- Line-up confirmed…Stephanie McNicholas, Des Mannay, Pete Akinwunmi, Ben Wildsmith, Nicholas McGaughey, Susie Wild and yours truly Rob Cullen presenting and reading. Let me know if you’d like to read in the openmic.

Bio’s VoiceontheBridge Thursday 7th July 2022

Stephanie McNicholas trained as a journalist in Cardiff in the 1980s and went on to write for national and regional newspapers and magazines. Steph published her second book – WHEN PONTY ROCKED! – in 2021. It tells the stories of the many musicians from her home town in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.

Pete Akinwunmi is the vocalist and songwriter with the band TaffyWasAThief. Poetry writing developed from lyric writing resulting in narrative poetry combined with the urge to entertain. Brought up in care in 1950’s/60’s Aberdare, South-Wales as the only black person in the Cynon Valley has provided a distinct and unique view of his homeland.

Nicholas McGaughey lives in Pontypridd. He has new work in Bad Lilies/Stand/Lucent Dreaming/The Friday Poem and Spelt Magazine.

Susie Wild is author of the poetry collections Windfalls and Better Houses, the short story collection The Art of Contraception listed for the Edge Hill Prize, and the novella Arrivals. Her work has recently featured in Carol Ann Duffy’s pandemic project WRITE Where We Are NOW, The Atlanta Review, Ink, Sweat & Tears and Poetry Wales. She has placed in competitions including the Welshpool Poetry Festival Competition, the Prole Laureate Prize and the Mslexia Women’s Poetry Competition and performed at festivals including The Laugharne Weekend, Green Man and Glastonbury.

Ben Wildsmith was born in Birmingham at an early age and began crawling westwards immediately. He is a songwriter, journalist, support worker and anarcho-syndicalist carbuncle on the body politic. He is a Literature Wales bursary recipient and Hay Festival Writer at Work. You can read him each Sunday in Nation Cymru.

Des Mannay is a Disabled, Welsh writer of colour. Poetry collection, “Sod ’em – and tomorrow” (Waterloo Press). Co-editor ‘The Angry Manifesto’ journal. Prize-winner in 4 competitions, shortlisted in 7. Performed at many venues/festivals, in numerous poetry journals, 36 anthologies. Judge in ‘Valiant Scribe’ competition.

Rob Cullen has organised VOB since 2017. He is a gardener, environmentalist, poet, writer, artist. Throughout lockdown he has been frequently published in Resistance Poetry, & also The Lark, US – Plus The Atlanta Poetry Review; Culture Matters anthologies Ymlaen/Onward & Gwrthryfel/Uprising & A Fish Rots from the Head as well as “The Learned Pig” Arts Journal, Cambridge, UK. Rob’s work regularly appears in the Red Poets annuals. He’s completed two novels.

See you there!

….

Sitting on a chair outside our bedroom 

looking up at the mountain ridge

…

There was a time

in the first week of May

when the sun was setting

…

behind the wooded ridge

the warm air shimmered

with insects in their millions

…

the sounds of Martins and Swifts

Swallows too feeding in the dimming light

and now the light is bare

…

and everything, the hours

and the day is still…

so quiet you know it’s not right

©robcullen10062022

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!

existence…emain…unsuspecting…fact…frustration…in!

…

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

On the ferry,

I liked sitting

on the edge,

looking down,

through dead water*.

…

I was returning

to a place

that was

and was not

my home.

…

I had never

been away,

returning

on the ferry,

looking down.

…

The River Suirs’

waters swirling,

muddy grey,

where it meets

the sea.

…

In the morning,

waiting, waiting.

Nearer now

to the quay,

where he’d be waiting,

with the brake and horses,

a pair in hand.

…

Home again.

Looking down through dead water.

…

©robcullen06032021

*Deadwater – the mass of eddying water formed along a ship’s sides in her progress through the water