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Gwent Levels Campaign - Live Performance Event at Le Pub High St Newport

  • le pub high street Newport NP20 1FW UK (map)

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).