5 Poems by Byron Beynon

Byron Beynon lives in Wales. His work has appeared in several publications including Agenda, London Magazine, Cyphers, Planet, Crannog, Poetry Wales, North of Oxford and the human rights anthology In Protest (University of London and Keats House Poets). He coordinated the Wales section of the anthology Fifty Strong (Heinemann). Collections include Cuffs (Rack Press) and The Echoing Coastline (Agenda Editions).

RENOIR AT LES COLLETTES

The cicadas already conduct the sound of the day. Early conversation in a garden with olive trees and a view towards the Mediterranean.

The optimism you had - being an old man with crippling arthritis - for life, health, the beauty and vigour it could afford.

Inside the house your studio with armchair, easel, brushes and frames, the quiet edges of the room.

The hushed strokes of passing time, the depth of eye as figures walk by flooded in red-golden light, the sensuality touching a disclosure of heat.

GEOLOGY

The framework of names connected to a pressure of rocks dating a countryside

with soft and hard looks, the sequence of layers with fern imprints,

an identity brooding with age; the tribal faces with Ordovician and Silurian families,

their shadows caught by the links of territory. Blue stones sifting

through the mind’s burning frost of evening, a source where the dark earth threads silently from

intense foundations, the marked origins deepening during the passage of fugitive time.

GIRL READING

I see her standing alone engaged with words that the mind's eye translates into private thought. How many hours has she inhabited this place? Shut inside a landscape where language makes a difference, absorbs and changes things. She focuses on pages that turn quietly with the eloquent breeze, like those silent years biding their time under skies and fields.

SEALS

This morning you telephoned that two seals were swimming in the Tawe, they brought with them innumerable seagrams, navigable rhapsodies gleaming with motion, a lustre of sea-eyes that floated in fields where tides registered global warmth, changeable seasons; for a moment they held your breath, sensed their need to escape at one with their tidings delivered across the miracle of unchained waters.

ZONE

A scenic vase with flowers on the sill of a house

faces the clothes line hung in a February alleyway

transformed today into a necklace worn

by Venus, queen of laughter, mother of love,

rich globules of liquid - pearls which mirror

a benevolent zone's splendour after the rain.