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.

Lady of the Lake

After Gerald Stern

No one there to remember with me
the tat and Americana they hawked
at Checkpoint Charlie or that café nearby
where the coffee rose rich and the strudels
oozed their warm caramel invitation

nor anyone to share the sardines I ate
on a beach that day in Sicily the minute
they were hauled from the waves and tossed
in a hot pan with oil and salt and the tartness
of fresh lemons plucked off a tree

not even a photographer to help me process
the stills I caught with my telescopic eye
the time a hundred white pelicans unfurled
their feathers in the southerly light to sail
on a lake like so many swans to Avalon.

Night Shadows

After John Burnside

I think, if I tried, I could go back and find
your hand again, hold it as you held mine
that day in the house of hidden places,
touch the night shadows just beyond
the sallow candlelight that never quite
unhides them, the dark things snickering.

You sensed a presence too, didn’t you,
an intimate parasite, felt it walking with you
as if you’d always known it, hummed to it
while you plied the treadle of your Singer,
as though you already felt its contours,
the vindication, the pain to come.

A Song of Nothings

Beneath the blue oblivious sky, the water
sings of nothing, not your name, not mine.
– Don Paterson

You didn’t have a name
at first, the day the comets
came and waters burst their banks
and there you were, all wet

and born and startling.
I sang a song for you then,
a song of nothings that you alone
might understand, of snowdrops

shivering late on a February
day when snow came
to the Sahara, and the dunes
shone white and russet.

Prism

Sometimes I dream it was never quite mine,
not fully, this place we built with towers and
walls that rose to divide us, the inevitability
of the day you’d had enough and left,
the confusion as I wake in a strange land
blinking back the surprised light.

Perhaps there were too many flaws and flares
in a glass that gave you no way out
or room to breathe, and all we could ever
imagine was the endless refraction
in a prism of our own making.

Or perhaps even harsh and dissonant words
have a place so long as they speak their truth,
give life to something raw, something aching
to be said, demanding they be heard

like my love for you, and my relief
that the Gods come only to tease
in the pre-dawn of possible days.