Welsh writing in English

Return to Cardiff

‘Hometown’; well, most admit an affection for a city:
grey tangled streets I cycled on to school, my first cigarette
in the back lane, and, fool, my first botched love affair.
First everything. Faded torments; self-indulgent: excessive giving in to own agendaself-indulgent pity.

The journey to Cardiff seemed less a return than a raid
on mislaid identities. Of course the whole locus: exact place or locationlocus smaller:
the mile-wide Taff now a stream, the castle not as in some black,
gothic: macabre, mysterious/ C12th to C16th architecturegothic dream, but a decent sprawl: expansion which is not carefully plannedsprawl, a joker’s toy façade: front of a building/ false appearance that hides realityfaçade.

Unfocused voices in the wind, associations, clues,
odds and ends, fringes: outer edgesfringes caught, as when, after the doctor quit,
a door opened and I glimpsed the white, enormous face
of my grandfather, suddenly aghast: shocked and upsetaghast with certain news.

Unable to define anything I can hardly speak,
and still I love the place for what I wanted it to be
as much as for what it unashamedly is
now for me, a city of strangers, alien: strangealien and bleak.

Unable to communicate I’m easily betrayed,
uneasily diverted: side-trackeddiverted by mere sense reflections
like those anchored waterscapes: landscapes in which an expanse of water is dominantwaterscapes that wander, alter, in the Taff: River Taff (flows through central Cardiff)Taff,
hour by hour, as light slants down a different shade.

Illusory: not real, but with the appearance of being realIllusory, too, that lost dark playground after rain,
the noise of trams, gunshots in what they once called Tiger Bay.
Only real this smell of ripe, damp earth when the sun comes out,
a mixture of pungencies: very strong and sharp smellspungencies, half exquisite: extremely pleasantexquisite and half plain.

No sooner than I’d arrived the other Cardiff had gone,
smoke in the memory, these but tinned resemblances,
where the boy I was not and the man I am not
met, hesitated, left double footsteps, then walked on.