Huw Gwynn-Jones comes from a line of published poets in the Welsh bardic tradition, though he denies ever having worn a druidic robe. He began writing as a retirement project shortly after moving to Orkney, since when his work has appeared in Acumen, Tears in the Fence, The Galway Review, Lighthouse, Marble Poetry, Anthropocene, and Obsessed with Pipework. His debut pamphlet, ‘The Art of Counting Stars’, was published in October 2021.
Tin Pan Alley
It’s April-hot on a sunblind slow Okeechobee
as you drift down a river of grass and blue-green
dreams when something stirs in the undergrowth –
the tell-tale splash of ridge-backed hides
with snouts and eyes implacable eyes
approaching hard-a-starboard and now
a glint a hint of movement in the reedy deep
as you try not to rock the boat your idyll
for two with wine and a picnic tied in muslin
a frisson of fear as of nervous things
being herded and a sense that the rest of your life
starts now with a scatter of scales and gills
and the urge to let it all go and dance the quick
quick-slow of twitching fish as they flap their fins
heel-toe in sequins of red and gold and silver.
El Capitan
After Gerald Stern
This is the place isn’t it, the shores of Tioga
Lake where we stop on that endless
ascent from Death Valley – the place
I raise my fist and nearly lose it with you,
stumbling close to rage and the sound
of distant breath, a shameful exhalation.
And here’s the Eastern Gate where
at last we limp into Yosemite to find
a song, a stream, a rock where people
climb free. And this, this is time
out of time as I get to drive those miles
again remembering my own father’s fury.
De nada, Dad, you say as I apologise after
twenty odd years. I don’t remember that.
Pasque Flower
Right or left, we barely gave it
a moment’s thought. In the skitter of cold
February rain it might have made more sense
to stick to ponds and lowlands, but today,
for no particular reason, we struck out uphill
traversing scree and arid paths
and found our bodies strangely dislocated,
bone and skin from sinew, pulled apart
and reassembled high above the tree line,
the Alpine air a thin and pliant white
as though we’d somehow scaled El Capitan
and in that uninvited place had found
the Pasque Flower, mark of resurrection,
the whole of spring and Yosemite glistening
in those few yards of old Botanical Gardens.
Blues
The day I left home I danced
a crazy dance like some young kid
with a tub of Brylcreem who’d found
his shoes were blue and made of
suede and his feet started moving
to the music and this manic beat
this road-rhythm that could take him anywhere
and everywhere and now always now
but then I was forever saying goodbye
to someplace or other and moving on
always rocking around the clock
and shuffling my feet until one day I danced
my way right out of a woman’s dream
because she needed so much more
than twelve bars and a beat let alone
a pair of blue suede shoes.
The Galway Review 