The Barns of Tonysguboriau
Talbot Green (Welsh: Tonysguboriau “lea of the barns”) is a town (and electoral ward) just north of the M4 motorway, in the County Borough of Rhondda Cynon Taf, Wales.
1.
I always wondered why I should
and why I should not visit?
A road sign for Tesco Extra.
The brutal tarmacadam leading on.
I saw children
in its barns, sliding down the hay
as I had done once in another place,
rubbing the hay dust from their eyes,
a vanished place exactly like
the Tonysguboriau of my small soul.
2.
Ah, darkness –
successive shelves of shadow.
Such darknesses
seemed to have more meaning then
when we were all
so much closer to the ground.
I remember the smells
that our own barn bore
– its choking sweetnesses
of tractor oil and cut ragwort –
but also, marvelously concealed,
a wren’s nest
woven out of last year’s leaves
and the green wrapper
of a chocolate triangle
in a box of Quality Street,
then braided with moss.
In infinite care.
3.
And I return
to our jostling ghosts
and an argument
about the best way to prick and blow
a wren’s egg, its dirty white
horizon, hot and stolen
and impossible to hold,
so delicate its shell.
Beware the wy clwc
we had been warned,
there was usually such a worthless one
in every clutch,
but collectors all,
our trespassing gang
who always sought the thrills
of stealth and secret theft.
And yes, it’s true,
I would be transfixed
– usually rigid with fright –
by the golden bubble
that grew enormously
whenever I stooped to kiss the shell.
4.
Later, I recall
another robber bringing in
a whole cabinet
with its smell of sour yolk,
handwritten names
and dates identifying
an enormous herring gull egg
still smeared with shit,
a dunnock’s turquoise pearl,
exquisite at first sight.
How we envied
such improbable success.
5.
Now, sixty years have somehow gone
but I can taste the clover in the hay,
thistle, knapweed, nettle, dock,
silverweed, pineappleweed,
grasses in their swathes
and the purple crowns
of devil’s bit scabious,
all a mown field’s
cornucopia underfoot
pitchforked into the scented reek
that always filled our barn,
and those friends disappearing
like a smudge of bonfire smoke
yet reappearing, as some fires will,
even when I’m sure
the flame’s extinct.
*
Wy clwc = addled egg
11.11. – 22.11.22
Robert Minhinnick is one of Wales’s and the UK’s foremost poets. He is the prize-winning author of essays, poetry, and fiction. He has also edited a book on the environment in Wales, written for television, and provided columns for The Western Mail and Planet. He is the co-founder of the environmental organisation Sustainable Wales, and was formerly the editor of Poetry Wales. Most recent books are his nonfiction essays Delirium (Seren Books), his novel Nia (Seren Books), and the poetry collection Diary of the Last Man (Carcanet) which was Wales Book of the Year, winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award, and shortlisted for the Forward Prize.
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