Criccieth
A poem about place, and more.
Criccieth
Agile long-necked egrets flit through salt-marsh,
flashing white in spring sun, as if pecking cattle
in Africa, not this grand sweep of Cardigan Bay.
Grey-shrouded with patience, a heron waits to stab,
invisible to untrained eyes. As we near, it dry-flaps airborn
over sheep with dayglo smit marks on their shaggy pelts.
Llywelyn the Great built the castle later burned down
by Owain Glyndŵr, because the English had turned
it into captives’ hill… History and the Welsh tongue flow
tides and streams from a teacher tending his babbling line
of bilingual kids. Stripes of sand and shingle lead to dunes
where lizards hide and RS Thomas’ fierce quietness insists
on timelessness, on ‘growing rich with looking’. We look
at the soft purples of harebells, the sharp of gorse,
flitting stonechats, wind’s traces, waves folding in over land.
To avoid a spring, we pick around hollow anemone shells,
crunch bladder wrack and salt sand. Out-of-season cars
drive onto the strand to set up their…
