Castell Conwy POEMS
How to Turn a Castle Inside Out
Built outside in whitened
shining with lime until slighted
and stripped
my iron, lead, alcoves all worthy goods split.
Not only conquerors slight,
the light-fingered
filching stones in many small slightings,
is it slighting
if a farmer builds a barn with fine sills?
My rounded towers petalling open skylights
atop sea rock for white doves alighting
in my windows. Rain runs through my shell in drips
and danks rinsing and rinsing,
forming new mosses lichens,
all my populations open to the sky,
and only the very young charge unsteadily
arms out half-falling till
hot little hands clasp my stone sides.
Charlotte Wetton
On the stream outside Conwy Castle
a body of water breaks over stones / on sandy bed outside the castle / foam afloat & breaks further down / my feet in sand sinking / I watch / see how the surface is like a mirror / see myself in the mirror / & how the mirror shatters / moves as a body emerges / reaches from within with curves / a body not unlike my own but / made of folds & weeds & / water drips beads from her hips / beads slip down rock faces / trace down damp moss / beads return to stream / she stretches her limbs / body folds / reforms / body constantly moving / & I think about my own / as I stand amongst shrouded mist / on the bank of Conwy / I feel the aches of my body / will crumble like bricks over time / & I want to look like the body before me / she is a mirror / & as I think about the woman with her curves & the way she moves / & the mist of the place / she melts back into water / dribbles away / the shape of her gone / on the bank of Conwy I think / & I think & I think of a body not unlike my own
Willow Michael
Dear Himeji
I wonder, if we were neighbours,
could we have joined as united dictators?
Or would your zinmen-seki ward away my dragons,
and would my murder holes shield from your herons?
We heard the bombs dropped on you by an eagle
your glistening white walls held samurai’s survival.
Did you hear of Owain Glyndwr’s traitors?
Fifteen weeks fooled under the pretence of labour.
Our battles from the times of shogun and medieval
prove us as worthy players of the immortal.
Know that the same light that shines into our cathedral,
painted with the shades of stained glass,
that dries the green moss sponges,
is the same sun that sets on your castle.
And when we cried “God save us”,
you echoed with “namu mida butsu”.
And although we could never meet,
we are introduced on the rubble of tourists’ shoes,
and the “shwmaes” and “konnichiwas” offered
between students and the retired.
In Conwy’s calon and Himeji’s kokoro
we beat as one, our skin wrinkled clay.
I’d throw myself to you,
but you’re much more than a stone’s throw away.
We used to fear the sky falling,
but one day we will be in it together –
here shachihokos and red dragons will be dancing.
After all, it’s not like we are getting any younger.
Isabella Gaywood
the algae of Conwy
Tucked up between two old stones, green algae, bright and septic
candy, sour on the palette, dripped onto my upper back-
exposed from how my shirt gaped while hunching over a notebook,
trying to make a better poem than this. Something epic and worthy
to honour and to exalt these ruins into legend; to have revolting
prisoners, glutenous kings, mischievous servants, absent queens;
innocent stable boys and corrupt knights, ripped from Chaucer,
re-painted and re-printed to shelve by the Mabinogion, amongst
other tales of yore.
And yet, the water from that speck of algae has
chilled me to my marrow. I have no other real memories of my day
in Conwy. I couldn’t tell you a single real fact, despite being interested
at the time. That chill has wedged itself in the ridges of my brain like
it was planted there, to spread and siphon away more romantic
concepts and leave me with only magpies, ferns and mist. It
blinded me, leaving me to stumble over stairways and into deep
wells, emptied of water, filled with echoes.
Valentina Ashdown
Keepers of Conwy
A curious, white breath
bends through the trees,
asking the scumbled leaves,
everything they have half-forgotten,
everything that still hangs on
like the fish,
clawed overhead.
Nothing answers except the castle,
whose milky walls and giant girders
recall a feast:
suckling pigs,
fat rabbits,
rich spices from the East.
The table, cruel but honest,
the dishing up of bodies,
the spilled juice of berries.
Then the sun steps out from behind a cloud,
trying to remember
and kisses with its golden mouth,
the damp stone-edges,
the dark corners,
making out all the loveliness it can
but the sea beats on against the cliffs,
crying out for the lost parts of time —
women,
who sat high in the tower,
drawn in by the full, bright moon,
twisting their curls and comfrey,
crouching bare foot
for the silent executioner.
This restless water,
this body of salt,
spills herself
so nothing is forgotten.
Leneta Hey
What they call
Some kids walk into those towers,
bored laying on the floor, sticking
their feet up against the walls.
Scratching in their names,
sitting long enough that they call
the place their own
The rooms echo and grow out of their destruction.
Stone wet from hesitant breaths that blow
into the porous walls and out towards the sea.
The môr, that does not call itself that
but crashes
itself all the same on the shore,
lan, which neither calls itself that but stands
firm in its meeting with the mor
and salt air, aer
halen.
Pinching in the back of throats.
The breaths whisper
hiding in the cracks, called
forward and stepping into the light, stretching out
along the room they once called
their own.
Lucy Giles
Plants as mortar
My dad stood in the rose bushes out back,
after he wasn’t in the house anymore.
He was there when I limed our walls
last summer peering through the
windows. Looking at the flowers
on the kitchen table next to mum’s school
books and keys. Next time, I’ll bring
flowers, those roses, through the brick.
It's the moss and lichen that crawl out the
cracks in the old castle now, pushing through
what’s already there as the rip currents do
below. Into the sea, contorting
in on themselves. Weaving like child
flower crowns and the stuff that used to
litter the banquet halls. Plants dried
under dried paint versions of themselves.
Is it wrong to want the walls to crumble
a little more, to see the outside at all
angles. So the flowers can come to you.
There’s a cliff down to the road and
he’s not in one of those cars anymore,
neither the town beyond. Maybe now he’s
the west wall’s gaps, where you can see the sea’s
push and pull and the land after, the potential of it all.
Bryn Williams
Questions for Conwy
Could you see the blood
on the limewash wall?
Could you hear a scream
from the thousand foot tall
prison tower that wafts
aromas of feasts
through the nostrils
of damned men
above the great hall?
Conwy’s fortress stetches
around the village,
an irony to protect
pillagers from pillage
against farmers who
pay tithes and dues
to Kings and Queens
lest they seek to drown
in their own blood spillage.
Like the Romans,
Hadrian or Antonine,
why do settlers
build stone fences
around the borderline?
Why build monuments
of might, a gaudy sign
of their wealth and power
and separate themselves
from land that is
yours, his, hers and mine?
Alfred Davidson
Iau na waliau
My feet in boots are stood
on timber younger than walls.
Damp walls sink into
soil damper than
the rain on my coat.
I walk
up walls on steps that
spiral and spiral,
spiral, I'm sick – I
might be sick
in my head,
I spiral, feeling sick on
narrow steps, spiral and
spiral – then up,
then out, and there’s light.
The air is wet with
mist that climbs up
on hills. I lean. I lean. I look
out. I look down – I might be
sick, so I grip the rail that’s
younger than the walls -
that cut off too soon
above my shin
to steady my nerves
on a day this
brisk.
In spite
I look out – there a pair
of blackbirds, crows -
two jackdaws nestled
in each other’s necks
between the
parapets
and then they fly
safe from wind and wet,
to a home in a murder-hole.
My eyes glaze over in the drench,
boats sit and slope
in the sand – shunned
by a fleeting tide.
I spot a few
jackdaws more. They fly up
a chimney. Here
the year 1881,
a brief shallow
though stone
and moss
is engraved above
the initials WJ;
who is dead but,
here he is
younger than the walls.
Finnen McNiffe
Conwy Castle
We bucketed
down
stairwells,
swam through
clammy
doorways,
feet pattering
as we pulled
up sticky
jean legs,
hurled our
breeze-wrecked
bodies through
the chapel,
hair slobbered
and spun loose.
I think
the women
in the walls,
heavy with
kirtles,
spindles
and dowries,
could hear us
running
and running
and running
like they did
in their dreams.
Liberty Sharma
The Haunting of Conwy Castle
The Crow and the Canary perch on the chapel tower;
arrow loops sunk with lichen and choked flower.
The weathered Carreg stands from the thaw and glaws,
presided over by corps of the Raven's veiled craws.
The pallid clock and chipped hearth, their lasting werth –
garrisoned by Benedictines doomed to walk the earth.
What oracles stash in Conwy's firths and reeds
shrouded under ashen umber robes and marred rosary beads.
Are they anointed from their shambled Nave to sail and glide
to weathered stone rotundas where their honour died?
faulted to skulk and skud from cellar to mound
marked by scent of clover? Master and hound.
Armorial ground they lave with harrow and flaughter,
eroded names dredge the well of dew water.
Minister sons of Llewyn in their final hours
comfort the quiet without tear or lours.
They counsel the manacled on the prison’s path,
cloaked men whose unction tempered Longshanks’ wrath;
eons now they cocoon from the raging gwint,
form hidden from the glint of smoking flint.
Haunting centuries of ash and soundless light,
dry winds dwelling in the net of night,
ordained to roam masonry of crags and skelf
and ramble across hills as old as time itself.
Tom Frankland
Mynydd Y Cnawd
Mountain of Flesh
We sit beside
white pigeons, more like doves,
nestled into stagnant rock,
still damp with mother’s kiss
fished from misted sea.
There’s moisture on sleeves,
the fur of my coat, my shroud,
these clouds kiss dampness onto the stone
that touches me.
The tender stench of mother’s
mouth outstretched like
sea,
mother’s breath proud above trees, leaden,
with honey and lemon,
suckled for nurture.
From soft ridges, sea blows sediment to
the walls once white,
like the pigeons we thought were doves,
jackdaws we thought were blackbirds;
black as brick where
moisture hits
my feathered sleeves.
Rebecca Gevaux
Paintjob
The echo of a ceiling creaking has
long since departed. Sliding out of
frame with the night owls and the hum
of the hall. Only pigeons stayed put,
rattling around the misshapen rafters,
charred, dripping— the sight of the fall.
Triptychs of moss globs climb every wall.
This castle’s walls are not so much tucked
between hills as a boxer’s wrought knuckles
clenched up in a fist. I missed those days
before the light poked through
the slight gaps in the stone;
when the building’s bare bones
wore the golden clothes
of home.
My ceiling caved in, and the heavens
collapsed; it all peeled away;
the plasterboard fell.
Its aching damp wrath drew from the well.
The light seeped through from the castle
on the hill. The workmen came,
and they paved over, slaved under;
worked for the old beams
until a new gleam of white paint
sewed a pleat at the seams.
Jacob Broughton-Glerup
Eight Towers for Conwy Castle
What it comes down to is showing some muscle,
this castle made from stone from sand from stone,
a casket for soft bodies and a tool to crush
them with. So much for natural defences
in the land-grab, river-grab, sea-grab pincers
of a kingdom inching sideways. The castle runs
rings round us, walls of oozed bones and calcified
power, a rattle of old shells in worst-laid plans
where sea winds whistle through the cracks.
Mus musculus: from mouse come muscle and
mussel, a flexed muscle running up and down
under the skin, or a blue mussel as a mouse
in a case of pearl, nacreous on the inside,
calcite on the outside with a tidal ring for every
winter of finger’s width resistance, thickening under
gulls’ beaks and the crash of water storming in.
Zoë Skoulding
The Messages of the Pigeons
Cold and tired and damp. Half present, half
in 1283 in a medieval gown and a crown,
walking down these very halls, surrounded
by these same walls, except those were
white and these are gray, white a colour long
washed away. The fog dusted over the trees
as the wind shook their leaves, as if ghosts
were here surrounding the scene. A castle so
big and so tall must not let its defenses fall. I
imagine a world that was to escape the
world that is, but then I’m brought back to
crumbled walls and the smell of piss. The
pigeons close in around me, a vision of
white and gray, whispering their secrets
from when they were messenger birds with
so much to say. They tell me what happened
here, in this very spot, as I stand above a
great big hole in the ground envisioning
a massacre of bodies down below as they rot.
After all, history is only memory, a pigeon's tale
of all the things they have not forgotten.
Rachel Sander
Castell Conwy and Himeji-jō
In the east
a white heron rises,
arcing upwards in elegant curves,
beating time to a warlord’s memory
of battle drums.
Shirasagi-jō
In the west
a kestrel rides the breeze,
wings the colour of slate and stone,
watched through murder holes it turns and glides
over the estuary.
Conwy.
A shared heritage of defence and attack built on
stone, slate, moss, wood, plaster, blood.
Soaring eaves and stone turrets reach towards
the same sunrise and sunset.
Liz Tunstall
Whose hollow crown?
Pigeons shy into castle cracks
as wild gulls glide in,
crowd the towers, turn out,
cry out of life.
The rat boy still runs,
runs errands for others out of time
and hates in secret the
chaplains chamberlains lords
gaolers soldiers and scribes.
The dog boy still grows, goes,
winds round, out of breath
and dies - almost dies -
down the stairs steep and slipping.
Worn voices echo out
within the dungeon walls,
beyond the stifling tapestries
that line a once-white ruin.
Jack Dorey
LEFT ALL ALONE YET NOT ALONE
Deep walls of salted caramel
mounds of dabbled paint
Narrow rectangle
a solar ray
Norman and Welsh
breath and languages
Salt-begotten air dwindles
on floorboards like coffee-stained paper
Stone mountain
stone roots
who’s counting?
Breath of truth
in a stone-cold clutch
Free sound remains
in a haunting presence
angel stone
under chunky boots
Botanics left standing a tad dry
hidden patches of dried platelets
from antique battlefields
no sense of grounding
Shall I roam these halls of stone?
They are rigid and volatile like old bone
a castle of hard and soft bone
The castle rumbles and groans
Your heart: half black
half red
Julia Niedzinska
Castell
Pobl: the vowel is pronounced like a pebble in the mouth,
‘O’ as in lost not ‘O’ as in noble.
A mouth is a round shape, when arrow pierces rib.
Death, cold stone, stops breath.
Pobl slaughtered. Pobl unconquered.
Tall towers trumpet foreign vowels.
Pobl listening. Pobl unconquered.
Edges of blades, sharp in the half-light.
Pobl rising, Pobl unconquered.
Stone corbels block glimpses of flanks of free mountain.
Pobl confined. Pobl unconquered.
Distant green, sunlit, throat tightens with hope.
Pobl oppressed. Pobl unconquered.
Rain runnels, cold channels, bare feet on cobbles.
Pobl enduring. Pobl unconquered.
Stink of dungeons by tapestried chapels,
filigreed windows, shattered bones.
Pobl imprisoned. Pobl unconquered.
Under ramparts, wide river opens to ocean.
Ripples caress, pattern green flow.
Pobl moving. Pobl unconquered.
Under water silt layers give rise to life stirring.
Pobl waiting. Pobl unconquered.
Gulls tumble from towers and swoop over hovels.
Pobl free. Pobl unconquered.
The years in their hundreds hold stories in stone,
echoes of voices warm the bleak spaces,
pobl remembering, pobl unconquered.
Not lost, ever mountain-rooted,
pobl reclaiming what always belonged,
land and language, myth and history,
pobl unconquered. Pobl. Home.
Beth Flynn
Three Eleanors
Où est Eléonore?
She is
floating in from Castile
holding her hammer of a husband,
dreaming of scented green lawns,
belly like a planet
longing for golden olives, soft tapestries
and sixteen births.
She lifts her heavy skirts to leap the keep.
She is not here.
Ble mae Elinor?
She is
swaying on foundations,
sighing for her forgotten daughter
fading in the hall beneath the mountain
(water falls in ribbons)
believing that the palace will protect
the line of princes.
She flows in summer silence to the Strait
She is not here.
Càit a bheil Eilidh?
She is
pressing a foot to the floor,
sewing dresses of bright Gordon tartan,
shaking a chunky bracelet at the TV,
pins clamped between her lips,
or striding along the ramparts
with grandchild in hand,
inhaling the freedom of the holiday.
She is not here.
Vanessa Griffiths
Echoes of Castell Conwy
In the shroud of a grey overcast sky,
rain drips like whispered secrets.
Damp, low-lying mist clings to ancient stone
where once the sun danced on pristine white.
Now a ghostly colossus stands—
a testament to Edward’s iron grip,
its walls crumbling, lime wash peeled away
like forgotten dreams.
In ethereal ruins of Conwy Castle,
lichens weave a tapestry of green,
encrusting the castle’s weathered heart.
Pigeons softly coo in hollow halls,
their sound the only whisper of life
in this fading monument of power.
Above, two jackdaws perch on high,
silent sentinels with knowing eyes,
observing their surroundings.
Above them, Yr Ddraig Coch hangs proudly,
while below, Conwy’s swirling tide merges
past and present in tidal whirlpools.
The wind howls through the womb of the castle,
each gust a reminder of ancestors’ groans, souls
lost in shadows of conquest. Where the fierce
spirit of Wales once surged like a storm
against the encroaching tide of the English army,
bombarded by ceaseless rain,
the weathered stone of the castle glazes over
and in the silence, the land speaks.
Geraint Jones
There’s no ‘a’ in Conwy
Ask any ant what wall can stand as hard
as glass, as black as day. Ha! That’s all sand,
awash. What can pass as fact, adamant
as a crab claw? Last crack at a plan.
What call sang bass as salt and vast
as tall dark arch? Act hard and slant,
say abracadabra. Yay! Ash falls
as last gasp, last grasp at dawn, a harsh pang.
All that razzmatazz. A land aghast may
want badly, may chant any psalm, may rant
as sky falls. Adapt, always, and charm. Yawn
at swank trash and stay sharp. Trawl slang
and scan brats’ talk. Class act. Catch a star
and watch a last sad party blast away.
Zoë Skoulding
This poem has not been translated at the poet’s request. It is an experiment that uses ‘a’ as its only vowel, a play on the frequent English mispronunciation of the town’s name as ‘Conway’. As such, it is not suitable for translation into Welsh.