Lleyn Peninsula Holiday Poem by C Richard Miles

Lleyn Peninsula Holiday



I half-remember scenes of Abersoch
so many years ago, in childhood,
playing on the windswept sand and rocks
a happy mudlark, looking out to sea

at St Tudwal's islands, tall in the bay
like statues, and Aberdaron's cove
with whale-back Bardsey looming in the grey
distance, while the white waves splashed

a foamy semicircle on the beach.
Porthmadog and Pwllheli paint faint
flickers fast past fading memory, each
a flashing silhouette of summer.

Some clearer scenes remain: each pointed peak
of Lleyn's three Rivals, stark against the sky,
gaunt grey-slate chapels, how we used to speak
those words, Merched and Dynion, with a laugh

as we confused them. Nefyn village, all
those years ago in nineteen-sixty-nine
when Prince of Wales' investiture, in tall
Caernarfon Castle must have led to grip

my mum and dad's attention on the set
in black and white, just monochrome back then
so they sought out a North Wales holiday let,
a rose-pink rose-wreathed cottage, I recall

just up the hill from the village shop,
though we'd negotiate a steeper slope
down to the narrow shelf-like beach, a drop
of several hundred feet with twisting bends

and a lung-bursting climb back up again
after a hard day's work on sandcastles.
I do not think that we encountered rain
that sunny summer, though I recollect

no painful sunburn that I often got
at other suntraps, like Barafundle
in the sunnier south, where the furnace-hot
unbroken rays wreaked havoc with

my pale fair skin. We went another day
to Butlins at Pwllheli, to join some
distant relatives from Hebden and they
amused us in the swimming pool, I still

recall, but other memories fail of that
far distant day, though clearer thoughts remain
of trips to Anglesey to see the flat
expanse of Red Wharf Bay, pass through the small

but long-named village of Llanfair P.G.
(and all the rest)en route to Holyhead
and Holy Island where we went to see
the jagged cliffs and spindly bridge that led

to South Stack Lighthouse, whitewash clad, almost
a lamp itself against the glum grey sea
that framed it as a background, where the host
of seafowl whirled and screamed, half-foghorn loud,

a mixed cacophony of bird and wave,
white noise against pale grey of cliff below,
grass-green of field above and jet-black cave,
a splash of symphony, eisteddfod-hymned.

Friday, August 14, 2015
Topic(s) of this poem: childhood ,holidays
COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Abdulrazak Aralimatti 15 August 2015

Going thr' the poem and experiencing your narration makes me to go thr' my childhood places and experience the same

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