BWBByron Beynon lives in Swansea, UK. His work has appeared in several publications including The Independent, Cyphers, Quadrant ( Australia), London Magazine, Poetry Wales and The Wolf. A former co-editor of Roundyhouse Poetry magazine, and a recent Pushcart Prize nominee. His most recent collection is Human Shores (Lapwing Publications)

 

REMBRANDT’S HOUSE

The odour of canals
at war with temperature
in a northern city.
The exposed beams of oak
inside a house
sold for thirteen thousand guilders,
number 4 Breestraat
its character developed
with brick, glass, wood,
stone, paint and tar.

Saskia stands by the artist;
in a street they observe
the strained façade.
He lives in an area
known for publishers and painters,
works inside a tall building,
gathers curiosities,
the pictures stacked
against and hanging
from the walls.

Children that die in infancy,
the stress of a late wife
who bequeaths the condition
of a small income.
After twenty years
he steps out of the front door
for the last time,
misused by hardships
he turns with a new inwardness,
still confident of his art.

NORTH of the RIVER

A woman sits opposite me
reading a book on Keats,
poised above her is Endymion,
choice words placed
near a map of the tube.
We are strangers travelling
between King’s Cross and Camden Town,
north of the river
during an autumn month
when all lines are running.
I read this section of his poem,
she her page,
as imagination paused
on a sentence in a tunnel
on the northern line.
A focused territory,
the minutiae reflected
across a subterranean atlas of rhythms
as the skilful pulse of language
echoed sharply through
all the continuous journeys
within experienced minds.

RHOSSILI DOWN

Here the vivid faces of bracken and heather
survive above the nerve of bay,
grooved sandstone paths, sites disturbed
by past images that shimmered
in the day’s heat-vibrating light,
this solid height of views, a raised
witness to rituals, life’s churning storms,
the unpredictable migrations
as entranced time continued
to retain endless power,
a bloodless search to shape a precise
meaning, a lemon moon’s zenith
over siftings and impediments,
the turmoil unsolved throughout
the human years.

CARN INGLIS
The Hill of the Angels

The sound of history’s pages echo here.
A hill with its glow of twilight,
virtuoso swirls
circling the vessels of summer;
footprints and dreams
within memory
view the taut breath of shared hours,
aware of fear and pain
hunting birds unveil
themselves inside an infinite breeze.
Shadows lengthening
with recurring rhythms
shaped from seasons of sensuous ice
clinging to the mind’s fierce shelf.

AGAIN

It is not that the nights
are too long, nor that I am
unsettled by the thought of the blank paper,
but the room is stacked high
with words and measured shelves
cover the walls.
Outside a silhouette
in a trespassed forest
walks the sleeping hours
nodding in agreement
that it was a good day,
and eternity’s not easily come by.

MRS DAVIES, VERDUN

She named the house
after a place she’d never seen,
capital letters painted
on a rectangle of glass
which fitted perfectly above the front
door facing a main road.
Her father had known Verdun,
he had witnessed
the evening darken over destroyed
bodies of the unburied dead,
saw too, the eyes of flowers
bruised in the slaughtered fields,
the saliva of flies in their millions
crawling on flesh.
Across the falling decades
she admired the light filtering
through the summer trees,
noticed the July hum of insects
disturbed in a humid month
by thunder that rattled windows,
brought a fresh cycle of rain
descending like continuous lines
across the human space of time.