Hello Poetry Lovers
Recently, at the Laureates’ Lounge in Staines in a delightful open mic poetry reading, organised by Adam Gary, there was a poet who read in English and Welsh.
It sounded superb, and tempted me to get out the Welsh forms I had learnt about and written.
We start with a Hay(na) Ku – please don’t make me pronounce it! – a very simple poetic form of a 3 line poem, one word in the first line, two in the second and three in the third. One can also do a reverse piece.
Hay(na) Ku
Please
Don’t say
Best left unsaid
Please
Don’t tell
Best kept secret
Please
Don’t write
Best avoid slander
Please
Don’t record
Best have silence
Please
Don’t listen
Best to ignore
Please
Don’t go
Best to stay
HM 2022
Then we move onto a Cyrch a Chwta (that seems better known) – an 8 line stanza, with 7 syllables per line. Line 7 crosses rhymes with line 8 on either syllable 3, 4 or 5.
Cyrch a Chwta
Your performance was so dire
So like a funeral pyre
It did not set me on fire
And don’t call me a liar
I knew you were crap prior
When I heard all this via
CRITICS WHO SAY YOU STINK!
Which I think is on the flyer
HM 2022
Weren’t they great, PL’s?! I’d like to see some of yours too…. Incidentally, I have the honour of being invited to be feature poet at the Staines Laureates Lounge on the 9th July. Come along if you can….
Thanks for tuning in, Poetry Lovers. We’ll be back with more poetry action real soon….
Heather Moulson 
Conqratulations Heather, you are really beginning to make yourself known as a poet in a number of different areas. Ax
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Loved seeing this. The different Celtic forms can be challenging. In my book, Mythos of the Door, I included several Celtic related poems, including this droigneach, an impossible form:
Desperation’s Providence
Crazed, the old man fled frightened from the house, unsettled
By spirit’s substance bled by the luminescence
Of energy, jangling jags nettled and re-nettled,
Made garish by the city’s flickering fluorescence.
Furious, he’d run to the dock, waters turbulent
On wet rock, his son’s stinging words echoing
Inside his head. He shoved his drumming discontent
Into a raging rhythm fed into his paddling.
Piercing into the moonlit island’s illumination,
Ancestral roots, rising from memories,
Deracinated, raging blood sparking rumination
Unlocked from a childhood’s flood of fantasies
Fulminating feelings long forgotten,
But still a song inside his consciousness.
He heard a singing unlike the jangling begotten
Of tangling time racing through his need to decompress.
Deciding suddenly, spirit wild, ascendant,
The child inside inspired, the old man, elated,
Grabbed his hand-held drum, descendants
Alive inside the meld decision’s dream created.
Climbing craggy cliffs where dark pines cling silhouettes
Against moon-silvered sky, spring serenading
Night as fields sigh slender, long-grass pirouettes
Beneath a breeze’s arc of shadow-waves cascading,
Carefree, careful, the old man seeks an overhang
Where cedars circle a coal-dark pool reflective
Of sky, human spirit whole, a boomerang
Fastening the eye on an earlier-earth perspective.
Palpitating lightning pulsed eeriness.
Above the old man moonlight convulsed, uncanny,
Until the sky-fire’s fury began to evanesce
Into circled cedars, dark-pool waters unearthly.
Unmanned, heart hammering, he stared at the intersperse
Of emptiness between stars, his son’s voice gravelling
In silence, “Stupid old man, your useless universe
Is cold dead bizarre,” he’d said. “Clueless! Repelling!”
Re-singing songs inside his head, immensity
In his breath, he stutter-stepped into a cataract
Of movement, dancing wildly, whirling festivity
Around the pool as he tried to counteract
Cacophony jangling madness mauling senselessness
Into a waning world of troubled turbulence
As stars shining on the pool began to effloresce,
Out of his desperate dance, recovering providence.
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