Words and Lines

Remembering Swansea

by Tris Kerslake

Roll out the damp slab promenade of Swansea Town where seagulls still proclaim their common greetings to the scallop men, and hold the echoed footsteps from that time which ring much longer in the mind than present footsteps ever shall.

Breathe in the brine that Jones the Fish called life, amidst the ever pungent whiff of sticky laverbread, my mother’s least desired dish, longside the memory of simple traffic which a dog could cross, hindered by no more than homely potholes and a distant tree.

Strum hard the painted park-green gates and rails with older fingertips than once were mine, and count the swings that cry unseated by the marching sycamores, greater both in mind and bole since youth, and see that all of us are far too seasoned now for little local shrines.

I beat a drum that’s far from Swansea Town, yet mute reminders ache to muffle all the world outside in granite tones and roaming shades of slate. No foreign anthem fills these streets, this small Welsh town, so known, still loved, exists within a pounding passion of my own.

Summon senses thin and faint from absent years, a sound, a scent are all I have, and puzzled am I that so plain a name can wrench me decades back, commands the sight which turns me blindly now and once again into a child of Wales and solid Swansea Town.