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Should I Stay Or Should I Go?
When I finished uni, I desperately wanted to stay in Cardiff. South Wales has always felt like home to me, it's where my heartbeat feels in sync with the wind in the trees and the hammers deep within the mines. I feel the dreams of ancestors long gone whispering in the wind, comforting me and reminding me I'm not alone.
Ostensibly though, what I long for when I dream of moving there is no longer there. The bungalow my Mum grew up in will soon be filled with the laughter and noise of another family, the only physical connections left in Pontnewydd now are the headstones and plaques marking the final resting places of grandparents, aunts, uncles and great-grandparents so much adored and so much missed. The parks I played in as a child, the canal we walked alongside, the shop that still bares the name my Great-great Grandparents gave it, the street named after them all still exist, but is that enough?
'No' is the answer, that's not enough. Moving somewhere in attempts to hang onto something I no longer have is a pointless use of a life. The three years I was in Cardiff were amongst the happiest in my life - that escape from the stifling suffocation of the village I grew up in was like a freedom I'd never experienced before. For the first time I began to understand who I was and forge an identity for myself based on who I understood myself to be. Cardiff meant I could breathe again. Despite it being many years since any family had lived in Cardiff and walked the streets of Cathays and Roath, I still felt a safety I so connect to that part of my heritage. I didn't need to be in Pontnewydd to feel like I belonged.
Fair Oak is my home, it's home because there's a familiarity about it, I know every inch of it and understand how it works. My parents are here, living in the house my sister and I grew up in. The flat I own and live in are here. Uni is near by, and my job just a bit further away. That's all here, but my heart isn't.
For me it's that age old battle between head and heart. The romantic in me wants my heart to take control, throw caution to the wind and discover happiness in all its wonderful colours and forms. This isn't one of those occasions where my heart wins though; at least not today. Today my job and uni and mortgage have won the battle.
Ostensibly though, what I long for when I dream of moving there is no longer there. The bungalow my Mum grew up in will soon be filled with the laughter and noise of another family, the only physical connections left in Pontnewydd now are the headstones and plaques marking the final resting places of grandparents, aunts, uncles and great-grandparents so much adored and so much missed. The parks I played in as a child, the canal we walked alongside, the shop that still bares the name my Great-great Grandparents gave it, the street named after them all still exist, but is that enough?
'No' is the answer, that's not enough. Moving somewhere in attempts to hang onto something I no longer have is a pointless use of a life. The three years I was in Cardiff were amongst the happiest in my life - that escape from the stifling suffocation of the village I grew up in was like a freedom I'd never experienced before. For the first time I began to understand who I was and forge an identity for myself based on who I understood myself to be. Cardiff meant I could breathe again. Despite it being many years since any family had lived in Cardiff and walked the streets of Cathays and Roath, I still felt a safety I so connect to that part of my heritage. I didn't need to be in Pontnewydd to feel like I belonged.
Fair Oak is my home, it's home because there's a familiarity about it, I know every inch of it and understand how it works. My parents are here, living in the house my sister and I grew up in. The flat I own and live in are here. Uni is near by, and my job just a bit further away. That's all here, but my heart isn't.
For me it's that age old battle between head and heart. The romantic in me wants my heart to take control, throw caution to the wind and discover happiness in all its wonderful colours and forms. This isn't one of those occasions where my heart wins though; at least not today. Today my job and uni and mortgage have won the battle.
Mametz Wood
This is a completely gorgeously written poem by Owen Sheers, with a short explanation first of the story behind it...
"I wrote this next poem, ‘Mametz Wood’, when I went to the Somme battlefield to make a short film about two Welsh writers who had fought at this place. The two writers were called David Jones and Wyn Griffith, and they wrote very very different accounts of this dreadful battle, but it was a strange battle because there seemed to be lots of poets present: it was also where Robert Graves was wounded; Siegfried Sassoon actually watched the battle, so it’s a battlefield of the Somme that appears again and again in memoirs of poets and actually in their poetry, and I really wrote this because while I was there they uncovered a shallow grave of twenty Allied soldiers who had been buried very very quickly but whoever had buried them had taken the time to actually link their arms, arm-in-arm, and when I saw a photograph of this grave I just knew that it was one of those images that had burned itself onto my mind and I knew that I would want to write about it eventually. As it happens I did, but the poem took a long time to surface very much in the same way that those elements of the battle are still surfacing through the fields eighty-five years later."
Mametz Wood
For years afterwards the farmers found them -
the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades
as they tended the land back into itself.
A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade,
the relic of a finger, the blown
and broken bird’s egg of a skull,
all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white
across this field where they were told to walk, not run,
towards the wood and its nesting machine guns.
And even now the earth stands sentinel,
reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened
like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin,
This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave,
a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm,
their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre
in boots that outlasted them,
their socketed heads tilted back at an angle
and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open.
As if the notes they had sung
have only now, with this unearthing,
slipped from their absent tongues.
"I wrote this next poem, ‘Mametz Wood’, when I went to the Somme battlefield to make a short film about two Welsh writers who had fought at this place. The two writers were called David Jones and Wyn Griffith, and they wrote very very different accounts of this dreadful battle, but it was a strange battle because there seemed to be lots of poets present: it was also where Robert Graves was wounded; Siegfried Sassoon actually watched the battle, so it’s a battlefield of the Somme that appears again and again in memoirs of poets and actually in their poetry, and I really wrote this because while I was there they uncovered a shallow grave of twenty Allied soldiers who had been buried very very quickly but whoever had buried them had taken the time to actually link their arms, arm-in-arm, and when I saw a photograph of this grave I just knew that it was one of those images that had burned itself onto my mind and I knew that I would want to write about it eventually. As it happens I did, but the poem took a long time to surface very much in the same way that those elements of the battle are still surfacing through the fields eighty-five years later."
Mametz Wood
For years afterwards the farmers found them -
the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades
as they tended the land back into itself.
A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade,
the relic of a finger, the blown
and broken bird’s egg of a skull,
all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white
across this field where they were told to walk, not run,
towards the wood and its nesting machine guns.
And even now the earth stands sentinel,
reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened
like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin,
This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave,
a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm,
their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre
in boots that outlasted them,
their socketed heads tilted back at an angle
and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open.
As if the notes they had sung
have only now, with this unearthing,
slipped from their absent tongues.
Who Am I? To Be Blind
I didn't write this quote, I read it on her0in-chic, but I love it - pretty much sums up everything I'd have written in a blog anyway...
And the worst thing is, you can’t tell. You can’t tell that the person beside you may be heart broken. You can’t tell if they are hurting all over. You can’t tell if they’re struggling to smile. You can’t if they just want to break down and cry. And the sad thing is; they wish you could tell.
And the worst thing is, you can’t tell. You can’t tell that the person beside you may be heart broken. You can’t tell if they are hurting all over. You can’t tell if they’re struggling to smile. You can’t if they just want to break down and cry. And the sad thing is; they wish you could tell.
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