New poem

Pentrechwyth village in the 1950s

<Audio>

Tricycled by boys with their butters crusted,

shop-knotted, pub-signed, and chapel-stepped,

church-fashioned parishioners Sunday bested,

arraigned in visages so long procrastinated.

In door-step scrubbed consanguinity,

with matching windowsills glossily painted,

stone and mortar souls senescent,

insufflated into curtained parlours and suffocated.  

Tiny, resurgent slag-walled gardens,

above scarf-erranded mothers bagging 

shop queues with their gossip listed,

brought tutt-tutted home, in rapture bated. 

Souls, sprig-cobbled and re-leathered, 

red letter boxed and phone box fired, 

fenestrated in sisterhooded whispers,

damp-knickered, and grey-hair gartered.

Seesaw poised and peopled nicely,

precisely homed and personated,

Band of Hope on the one hand, on the other,

public bar smoked pints and blather.

Street light, slingshot, black tooth caries,

gutter drained and Noah inundated,

sodden fields and rotting detritus,

with blackberry-reddened fingers much inveighed.

Rough stoned lanes of the other houses,

in unlit rough dark times inhabited,

hush breathed and hand in hand these others,

village stirred to dark-thicken the gravy.

A lad in this multi-cellular nursery,

outgrows restraint and bursting ranges,

mimicked in reflecting multi-mirrors,

a village villager must be envisaged.

Railing stick rattled, can kicked, 

kicked can, can kicked, and

tricycled, scootered, and Sunday schooled,

all set in stone but with a rubber soul.

From the spring spawn well,

to a cold, curled bed,

from end to end, when all is said,

envisaged the village in which we dwell.