Some of this work will be performed at 7.30 pm, Tuesday, April 16, 2024, at ‘Le Pub’, 19, High St., NEWPORT NP20 1FW. https://www.lepublicspace.co.uk/
This will be a live performance featuring spoken word, music and film.
The event is organized by Sustainable Wales Cymru Gynaliadwy.
Details for those who wish to perform or attend, from: <robert.minhinnick@sustainablewales.org.uk>
GWENT LEVELS CAMPAIGN
Ten days before Christmas, 2023, I went with writer and artist Laura Wainwright to explore parts of the ‘Gwent Levels’, at Uskmouth. It was my first visit, although Laura is familiar with the area, sometimes taking her children walking there.
We went because the area is increasingly threatened by various developments. Only in the last four years has the Welsh government rejected plans for a new extension of the M4 motorway through parts of these wetlands.
The weather proved raw and blustery, but we were both delighted to encounter immediately some of the very particular wildlife that inhabits the area.
I saw my first ever reed bunting, and keen-eyed Laura identified a heron on the Severn mudflats, and thus we are writing, painting and sketching our expedition highlights.
This exploration occurred at the same time as the ongoing struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, especially in Gaza. Personally I found combining in my writing the situations in both Gwent Levels and Gaza, quite natural.
THE REEN
a poem for two voices
Or rhyne or rhewyn
or simply ditch but even
the word itself disappearing
but nothing to be done, nothing to be done
like the creatures
we might have discovered there
yet nothing can be done
nothing can be done
and I turn on the radio
and over the ghettoes of Gaza
in the ruined boulevards
another child is weeping
but nothing will be done
nothing will be done
- ah, the petrol-coloured dragonfly,
the chevron of the demoiselle,
this one red, this one emerald -
or an exhibit in the museum
of barbed wire
with which we encircle the world,
no nothing to be done
nothing to be done
voice of the reaper, song of the drone
while the children must cry all night
in the rhyne and the rhewyn in the ditch in the reen
but even the word itself disappearing
like the creatures we might
have discovered there
- ghost of a yellowhammer
glimpsed though gorse,
grass snake aswim
in sedge beside the solar farm,
heron, a hermit holding on
beside its JCB scrape -
but nothing can be done
nothing can be done
so once again I turn on the radio
and over the ghettoes of Gaza
comes the harpies’ music,
the predator’s sigh
when even the words are disappearing,
rhyne or rhewyn or ditch or reen
because it is somebody else’s language
loved and lost
but nothing can be done
nothing can be done
and then I am reminded
that language is my own
but there’s nothing to be done
nothing to be done
but how memory maims
and how all grief is someone else’s guilt
while somebody else’s country
is vanishing like pixels on a screen
yet there’s nothing to be done
nothing to be done
in the ditch and the rhewyn and the rhyne and the reen
but nothing will be done nothing will be done
and now I am reminded by the same radio
that the country is my own,
and the voice of the reaper, the song of the drone:
they too are mine.
Yet there’s nothing will be done,
nothing will be done…
(With thanks to Marwan Makhoul, poet born to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother in 1979 in the village of Boquai'a in the Upper Galilee region of Palestine).