Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau?

Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau?

Land of my Fathers?

Nailed, they were, by work,

or by the lack of it more like;

jiggling to the puppet masters.

Ducking and diving, weaving 

a few bob, for a few pints, 

for a laugh, and a smoke 

and a cough.

Jack the Lad.

Nicotine-fingered on the yellow-brown

Ben Truman, Capstan Full Strength,

stained walls. Spinning a crooked-toothed 

yarn to the raucous card school;

double-tapping the domino across

a beer swilled table. Drawing down

the alcohol-warmed curtain on their day.

See you boys.

Jack the Lad.

Black did they haunt: the board-man, and

the means test, and the workhouse,

all down the back-rooms of their memory;

but blasé their devil-may-care attitude

to a life on the run from fate; long

gas-mantled, in a slum not slum,

clichéd in memory, but dire and close

at the time when the doctor’s panel 

ran the lottery of life.

I am, I am, Jack the Lad

In the Land of my Fathers the lad

and his girl become the couplet in

the poetry of the long-damned.

Their children twisting the puppet

master’s strings, that never break.

That tie the blackness with a bow

on the gift of a life in harness in the 

Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau?

But I was, Jack the Lad, 

I was, I was! In my

Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau

Wasn’t I?