A Poem Dedicated to Jon Gower by Tony Curtis

Blowing Eggs

For Jon Gower

Poem text:You say you were born a birder that day when your Gramps placed an egg on your outstretched hand. At precisely the moment that he knew you would feel the life moving in it. And then it cracked open with that beak and the wet plumage – a black and pink life coming into the world. So that you had been the tree and the branch and your open hand the nesting place, as Saint Kevin of Glendalough in the legend. How could a young boy not be taken by that magic? * It could have been another story: my Pwllcrochan cousins hunting in Uncle Ivor’s acres and across Bummer George’s pastures to Rhoscrowther. Three score years and more – a lifetime ago. Climbing trees to giddying heights, one arm holding on, one reaching for the nest. A pinhole at each end and then the full egg held between finger and thumb, lips kissing the blown life of the bird spat yellow out on to the grass. Pwllcrochan, that bay of shells you reached over the stream, through the rushes out onto the white crushed path and beach of shells broken down by wind and tides and fishermen.
Poem text: There was no harm, none was meant, for there were more eggs in the world than any boy could find. Shoe boxes of trophies, labelled or anonymous nestled in cotton wool and old socks, under the bed to be brought out, counted and looked up in books. And when big school and girls and rock ‘n roll came, the eggs were thrown out. Childish things, shells we tread on as we make our paths to other places. * Years before that robin hatched in your hand, in another time, the refinery had bought all Ivor’s potato fields, Bummer George’s grazing rights, the whole headland, as far as you could walk in a day. Top Dollar. Oil reek, the clank and hiss of the refinery. Now, the security men’s vans follow us down the lane to a village that has disappeared from the map. The place blown empty. Purse your lips and say it, say it again - pwll Pwllcrochan. Pwllcrochan.

Tony Curtis, born in Carmarthen in 1946 and raised in Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire, studied English at Swansea University and completed an MFA at Goddard College, Vermont. He worked in education for forty years, including as Wales’s first Professor of Poetry at the University of Glamorgan. He has written over forty books; recent work includes Leaving the Hills (2024). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.