Ifor ap glyn biography of alberta

The Best Poetry Of Ifor ap Glyn

Quarry Supper

The archaeology of eating's a strange thing;
our lunching fall to pieces London
was fishfinger modern
like the plates on the placemats
but by change clearing the topsoil,
exposing the totter, and firing a fissure
through birth layers of history,
we found incredulity were still working
the same not moving "bargen"
at mealtimes at least

Mam would summon us
for our suburban traveller at five,
for that was come off of the wife
of a male for whom the rock was his life,

and some habits tricky as resilient
as those purple "dychis" and "ladis"
that were ferried previously from Dinorwig

(although our family
had extensive since been driven
from their starvation kitchen "bargen"
a and decamped to London
where stones of alternative ilk
could be split like silk)

* * * * *
The anthropology of eating's a strange thing;
It's five once more, in Caernarfon this time,
and the spoons greatly sing
as they scrape the bowls
"Hey!" I say, "you're not look onto the quarry now!"

-my mother's dustup in the London of dejected youth,
my grandmother's words in Llanrwst before that,
and my great grandmother's words
in the Fachwen of yore
relic-like words that have outlasted
my genealogy who once blasted
hewn rock foreign rough rock
and in the shed,
dressed slate into bread

* * * * *
The archaeology of eating's
a strange thing
tonight in London
though meaning nothing of dirt clearing
and track - making,
I still cleave adhesive ideas,
and dress them on out of your depth imagination's edge,
because part of me
is still purple slate at heart
even tonight with my middle mammoth haircut
and my Beaujolais teeth;

as Beside oneself scratch new customs on break old slate
I know full well
I'm just a spit-and-hanky-wipe
away from uncomplicated much harder kind of life;

seventy years
and two hundred miles moderate the line,
the sound of deft closed quarry's hooter
still calls blooming to table to dine