nawr 006 Summer 2021 by nawrmag

ISSUE NO 6 | SUMMER 2021

n awr caru

CONTENTS art 4

Ode to St Valentine BERNARD PEARSON

On Losing My Chosen Father JD MURPHY

For Valour LAL DAVIES

3rd November CAITLIN VAN BUREN

Hold Me RHIAN BOLTON

An Attempt at a Philosophy of Love JAMIE DAVIES

Selected Artworks CARYS FLETCHER

Triptych AMY DOYLE

the last strawberry KIT GRIFFITHS

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literature

philosophy

“

I love you at the end of the line, on Penarth Pier just before the lights come on, January’s violet vespers watching us eat peanut butter Welsh cakes and sticky ice-cream, cold on my tongue and yours. I love you at Luskentyre and Seilebost and Dalmore, salt-licked and midgebitten skin knee-deep in gentle swells, breakers somersaulting to the shore with an edge of lacy foam.

featured artist: in conversation with EFA BLOSSE-MASON 20

Selected Poems GUINEVERE CLARK

Selected Poems MIKE JENKINS

Selected Artworks RUBEN LORCA

beth sy’n digwydd? MILLIE BETHEL

Soup KEVIN DYER

Y Bont NICHOLAS MCGAUGHEY

Selected Photographs TRACY LEONARD

Selected Poems RHIANNON OLIVER

EDITORS’ LETTER Issue 6 is here! This is our second summer issue - and it’s a summer of Love for nawr. The Welsh form of the word that we chose for the theme’s title, “Caru”, is the verb “to love”. It is love not just as the warm gushy feeling, but also as an action. Towards the end of his A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes writes that ‘it is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental’. Love has fallen out of fashion as a serious topic of discussion, even more so as a politicised one. Yet, when we first started thinking about the theme for this issue, one thing felt profoundly relevant: that love is, and must be, a political and serious work. What we wanted to explore was precisely this ‘love’s work’, to use Gillian Rose’s phrase; what does it mean to love, over and over again, to constitute and re-constitute oneself and those around us in and through love, and how, finally, can this work be reclaimed from the individualistic, neoliberal love, and re-directed as a political and engaged love? There is a profound power to a political form of love, one that has been purposefully negated by late-stage capitalism and the commodification of romance and desire. And after a year facing the pandemic, the sort of love that we need to sustain ourselves and to continue to see beyond our immediate worlds, is an encompassing, serious and continuously reiterated kind of love.

Millie Bethel, has written a brilliant and personal piece blending poetry and prose, which can be found on page 28 and 29. As always, we want to thank the tireless efforts of our designer Anja Quinn, without whom none of this would be possible! The issues are, despite the cliche, made with love; and in that sense, the issue itself can be seen as nawr’s meditation on the work of love. Cariad,

Anna, Jamie and Martha Co-editors

COVER IMAGE This issue’s cover image comes from Ruben Lorca. See more on pages 24-27.

These ideas are some of the central ones we wanted to explore with our Featured Artist for this issue, Efa Blosse-Mason, director of the wonderful BBC Welsh-language animated short film ‘Leaf Boat’. In the interview we discussed the inspiration behind the film, how Efa portrays love, and how love is always something to work at, something to construct. Efa’s short film can be found on BBC iPlayer under Beacons: Short Films from Wales. You can read the interview on pages 14 to 19. Love is also explored in this issue through some incredible art, literature & philosophy. The deep and innocent love that is felt for animals is articulated by Carys Fletcher’s beautiful paintings found on pages 10 and 11, and Caitlin Van Buren’s wonderful poetry, found on page 6, explores the way that love can defy words, and require new languages and new lexicons. Our Culture Writer,

Ode to St Valentine

Love sleeps through the night And is there when more Than the morning has broken. Love waits at the battle’s side The words of war remain unspoken. Love is not for sale, is not bought, By grand gesture or ‘here today’ token. Love is a hand, that is never a fist. It is a dream from which not even by death will it ever be woken. Like lava, love may flow red ruby hot. But this stream will never harden. For it irrigates the arid heart And returns us, stripped and bare To that once familiar garden.

BERNARD PEARSON nawr

On Losing My Chosen Father

No argument ever smeared the lips That now lie silent under mine, As if none of the rain that fell on me Fell on him as he played his part around The barns and sheep and the yellow piled hay, As if life were a blue sky and he A spitfire always arcing away from ground Into the sun, unchanging and unblown by winds That tried, but could not alter His course, which was so true. And though I kissed his cheek once, toward the end, To say the things I had not said, and could not say, I never told him what he was or What he was to me, and, though, he kissed my own, That time I kissed his cheek, now I will never know If he knew, if he saw, if he felt, or if… But he would have moved on from this. Once, together, we plastered the wall of the old barn, On a summer’s day like those Of the childhood he told me of, all bottled pop And wilted sandwiches, And the larks decried our efforts as I listened in silence to his memories, And made every stroke and smooth and slip And contact of my trowel to be As perfect as the grass on the meadow So that he, stepping back, at the end, Could look up at that wall so white It gave a second sun to the sky, And he would know, by its cow-cream smoothness, By its white infinity, What he meant to me.

JD MURPHY 5

For Valour

My mind throbs with It My blood pulsates with It Sometimes I dance with It Other times cry with It Thick and heavy I wear It Like a shield I’m gifted It For valour for bravery It’s Love

3rd November

LAL DAVIES

I have to create a new lexicon. This language lacks the language of friend-love, it lacks respect for you. It asked for a hyphen yet still it sits uncomfortably! I’ve tried words: barometer, witness, ark, balm, zane-stoker, cushion, constellation. I’ve tried phrases; grounding rod, escape hatch, found herd and bratpack, knotted thread laid flat. I’ve tried clauses; as we walk at our pace, we loyally gift our failures and wrap our mundane. We salvage a subsistence and try to be salvage from subsistence. Your face melded into name, which slips from my tongue into my common lexicon.

CAITLIN VAN BUREN nawr

RHIAN BOLTON is a Welsh maker studying and living in Manchester. Bolton is inspired by the art of second-wave feminist artists and their “femmages”, to the 90s resurgence in “sloppy art” and handcrafts, to artists of the northwest now exploring their home and upbringing in post-industrial cities.

An Attempt at a Philosophy of Love, Or: The Fantasy of the Encounter

♦

Either/Or; sunburnt lips. The lover’s name is always alien. The closeness to the Other, the furtive gaze, the embrace of a glance; waiting to catch a sight. What does one recognize in such a look? A density of Being, an opacity of Self and Other.

♦ A formula for love? – What is love if not the Other in the Same, and the Same in the Other? ♦ A formula for the failure of love? – What is this failure if not the becoming-Other of the Same, and the becoming-Same of the Other? ♦ Love is the philosophical question, in that inscribed within the logos of philosophical reason is the friendship of discourse, the invocation to communion in thought. The identity of philosophy, moreover, is the transcendently immanent; it is the very destabilisation of the project of identity itself, containing within itself at its core, as love, the Other. ♦ Love speaks to the Other and from the Other; it demands not only that the Other respond to me, but more fundamentally, that I respond to the Other. ♦ Lacan’s formula for fantasy: ( ◊ a). The subject desires the object, but desire, as unrealisable, descends into failure. The subject is barred from its own desire by the object of its desire. Or so the story goes. Lacan makes explicit that the formula can be read both ways, thus desire can in fact create the subject as easily as the subject can construct its desire, but desire, either way, remains stable. Desire is, in Lacan’s own canon, an irreducible. But what is desire? ♦ The look is the most intimate connection with the Other, for it is the look which structures all other touching. To touch is to feel one’s skin being looked at with another’s. It is in the look, in the realm of the visual still replete with Augustinian fantasies, that fantasy itself arises. ♦ But what of the fantasy of touch? To hold within one’s hands a memento, a trace; to supplement one’s being with the trace of another’s, is not that the fantasy of the touch? To hold and not simply behold for even a moment the world of the Other, the singular, impossible Other-as-lover whose name, all the while, irremediably, remains alien?

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♦ Tired eyes and some cigarette smoke and I think I finally figured out what Berkeley meant. She wears a short red dress with what look like from afar flowers on it from Chicago and something like Stop Making Sense plays to sunder the tenses of presence that Berkeley (or was it Descartes?) felt were present to himself. Thus, a certain key to love is precisely what Proust, a fellow asthmatic, realised; it’s all in time and time is a memory of one’s self in love with an Other far off and so desirous and so delirious. ♦ Intimacy is not unnameable, rather the unnameable is the intimate. The intimate, the unnameable, is the moment within Language when Language encounters its internal contradiction, that of the articulable. Language is always for the Other, and in this way, encountering a performative contradiction in which it cannot articulate the Other, Language as such is met with the impossibility of its functioning when it remains trapped in this passage from the un-said to the said, from the un-sayable to the sayable. The unnameable is nothing but the name for Language’s prison, a prison in which love and desire for the Other are fixed in a procession from potential to act. Intimacy is the un-sayability of the lover’s name insofar as the lover’s name marks not the limit-point of Language but its beginning; beginning always as an invocation to the Other, the lover’s name retroactively feels out-of-place, out-of-joint on the lips of the Same, because the event of the utterance signals the failure of the project of identity predicated on the ineffable, the stable, the fixed. ♦ And what of Desire? And what of fantasy? And what of the encounter? ♦ Pastiche and façade culminate in a modern art gallery of failed depictions, whereupon the event is entombed and a gaze falls to pieces; silken and honey like the taste of the glance, the look that craves at one and the same time reciprocity and non-reciprocity, a conundrum for a Hegelian in love or within desire, so constructed so as to be unknowable without, but the white walls foreclose and painted nudity prevails. Derelict eyes dance around the stairway till they are painted with shame, blood in one’s mouth, sunburnt lips, lilting prose, fantasy is the encounter with the impossible Other, the Other who, strictly speaking, does not exist. The impossible, anger at the witness (who is none other than oneself), either/or. ♦ A sworn bond in the Luxembourg gardens, like others before, for as the song goes, we too know that we are not new. And yet, and yet, like a stolen vignette, we perhaps offer something true. Perhaps, was Derrida’s refrain, only perhaps.

by JAMIE DAVIES, PHILOSOPHY EDITOR

CARYS FLETCHER Selected Artworks

My partner's dog Josie on a walk on Ogmore beach. Josie died a year after I met her, but she was so sweet and full of love and will always hold a special place in my partner's and his mother's hearts.

JOSIE

My current dog, 4-year-old, Spud. My partner and I got a half-feral rescue dog 3 years ago and although she still has her mood swings, we wake up to her excitable kisses every morning. The painting is of her sunbathing in her favourite spot in my studio after a big swim in the river.

SPUD nawr

My mother's 14-year-old dog, Poppy; the first dog I ever had at the age of 13, a year or two after my parents divorced. Poppy filled the gap for my mother who worked full time while looking after my brother and I. Taking Poppy for a walk was a great way of just taking some time out, for all of us! To this day, Poppy loves rolling in the grass, sunbathing and belly scratches.

POPPY

Gower roof dog! This photo was taken by my partner after he was unexpectedly licked from above! This lab was stood on the roof of a shed greeting everyone who walked past, making sure they knew they were loved.

ROOF DOG 11

Triptych tha gaol agam ort sa mhionaid I love you momentarily, at the juncture of the sea and the sand. In Camber, amidst dunes and desert and rough squalls whose winds dress me in dry ground, and the scrub of sand from hair and mouth and eyes, beneath a pool of nocturnal sky above, the same stars we marvelled in your winter garden all those moons ago, half-awake, no roof between us and those depths, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, seized with vertigo as we felt ourselves flung forth and plunging downward like divers. I love you between the rocks of Portobello and Musselburgh, the scent of seaweed heavy in the air, seagulls soaring overhead, dropping shellfish in a smattering of rain; shells smashing on the shingle, innards overflowing, picking our way through a crustaceous graveyard, I take your hand, leverage against the tombstone from which I descend. I love you at the end of the line, on Penarth Pier just before the lights come on, January’s violet vespers watching us eat peanut butter Welsh cakes and sticky icecream, cold on my tongue and yours. I love you at Luskentyre and Seilebost and Dalmore, saltlicked and midge-bitten skin knee-deep in gentle swells, breakers somersaulting to the shore with an edge of lacy foam. I love you on Loch Lomond sometime before I told you so, at the juncture of my flat and you, sun-bruised, Maltese sand in the creases of your fingers and an ocean behind your eyes – we travelled two thousand miles just to know. te quiero siempre I love you always, when I wake in the morning and fall asleep at night. In dreams and in memories, in your old flat on Partridge Road and in mine on Montague Street while I’m making two cups of tea with only one teabag and with sugar cubes I used to steal from your cupboard; when I’m whisking together scrambled eggs that I’ll never make as well as you, in the taste of the basil and mint leaves you grew in your kitchen window, and when perusing pages of your favourite books separated by newspaper clippings, magazine cut-outs and old poems – all these delicious souvenirs of where you’ve been. I love you as Marianne loves Elinor, as Jane loves Diana and Mary, as Amy loves Jo; in the long, soft meadow-grass and acrylic-painted trees against watercolour skies, in the operatic grief of Carmen and La Bohème, in the wake of every beautiful thing you may now never see. I love you as children are wont to do, sharing knowledge of days you haven’t lived and wanting you to know what they’re doing just for knowing’s sake. I love sacredly, silently, sometimes tearfully, on birthdays and at Christmastime, in the slow passage of time and the sliding of stars from one configuration to the next, in the changing of the seasons and the fresh opening and closings of pages, a movement through rather than a movement hence. dw i’n caru ti yn dawel I love you as a woman loves herself in small moments alone. At Holyrood’s daybreak when sleep has eluded me and where the land swelled from where an ancient fist has punched its way out of the earth and I sit to watch the eastern horizon, drawn to the golden linings of pink clouds, lights over the firth, a bursting nimbus. On nights of not enough wine and too much laughter, days of overindulgence and care, in pale mornings before the air has warmed. It’s a difficult thing, to love oneself, but it’s easiest when others love you first – I am a patchwork, in whom everyone I have ever loved has sewn their secrets, and I love this quilt quietly, unwashed and abed.

AMY DOYLE nawr

the last strawberry

we were two clear feet from death the morning I woke to a strawberry on the pillow with a note in your cruddy curlicue I love you. I’m on the roof. just enough sugar sharp breaking thirst and fast to meet you, to tug myself through the crumbling frame and out into the quiet buzz of high above the freight train tracks and the yawny stretching backs of orange luminous vested men who may or may not have watched our turning from open sky into the scrape of tiles thrust after gentle thrust while the earth that got there through the rain rubbed itself onto us up close we were skin and flesh and bones everlasting while, from far away, a little tangle of sunlight close to our death that day.

just enough sugar sharp breaking

KIT GRIFFITHS 13

INCO V E R ATI O W I T

N S N H

EFA

BLOSSE-

MASON

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Co-editors Anna and Jamie interviewed Efa via email about their short film ‘Leaf Boat’, a beautiful, animated Welsh-language short-film about love. The film can be found on iPlayer under Beacons: Short Films from Wales. The film was made through the Beacons funding scheme with Ffilm Cymru, it was produced by Amy Morris and has the voices of Catrin Stuart and Sara Gregory in it and the music was a song called ‘Tywod’ by Casi Wyn. ‘Cwch Deilen/Leaf Boat’ was selected by Whoopi Goldberg to be screened in Tribeca film festival in New York this summer, and it’s the first ever Welsh language film to be screened at the festival. Firstly, tell me a bit about yourself! How did you first get into animation and its storytelling? Hello, I am Efa. I grew up in Cardiff and when I was a kid I really struggled in school. I am dyslexic and was always the worst in my class at everything, but my escape was my dream world; I created mythical characters and was always making up stories about them in my head. Because I struggled so much in school I was really worried that I wouldn’t find a job that would suit me when I grew up, but when I was 17 I did some work experience with an animation company and it suddenly felt possible for me to find work that I loved doing. It was a wonderful mixture of art and storytelling and working with other like minded creative people. I then went on to study animation at Bristol School of Animation where I got a first class honours degree and my graduation film ‘Earthly Delights’ won the Royal Television Society Award for best student animation in 2019. It was, and still is amazing for me that I have found something that I’m good at! Helo, enw i yw Efa a dwi’n dod o Gaerdydd. Pan oeddwn i'n tyfu lan roeddwn i wir yn cael trafferth yn yr ysgol, rydw i'n ddyslecsig a fi oedd y gwaethaf yn fy nosbarth bob tro ym mhopeth, ond o'n i’n caru darlunio a creu cymeriadau hudol ac roeddwn i bob amser yn dychmygu straeon amdanyn nhw yn fy mhen. Oherwydd fy mod wedi cael cymaint o drafferth yn yr ysgol roeddwn yn poeni'n fawr na fyddwn yn dod o hyd i swydd a fyddai'n addas i mi. Ond pan oeddwn i’n 17 oed, wnes i profiad gwaith gyda chwmni

animeiddio a cwmpes i mewn cariad gyda animeiddio. Roedd yn gymysgedd hyfryd o gelf ac adrodd straeon a gweithio gyda phobl greadigol eraill. Yna es i ymlaen i astudio animeiddio yn Bryste lle cefais radd dosbarth cyntaf ac enillodd fy ffilm 'Earthly Delights' Wobr y Gymdeithas Deledu Frenhinol am yr animeiddiad myfyrwyr gorau yn 2019. Dwi dal mewn cariad hefo animeiddio ac yn teimlo mor lwcus dwi wedi dod o hyd iddo ac wedi llwyddo creu gyrfa yn gwneud e. Tell me a bit about the inspiration behind your short film ‘Leaf Boat’. The setting in particular intrigues me. It seems very specifically placed - a small seaside town in Wales. Did you have somewhere specific in mind when making ‘Leaf Boat’? I came up with the story of ‘Leaf Boat’ during a time when I was in a relationship with a woman who lived on a barge boat on a canal, and we were spending a lot of time together there by the water. However, after I wrote the story I decided to set it by the sea instead, because I wanted the atmosphere to reflect the inner emotions of my main character, Celyn, and I felt like the sea is more emotive - sometimes crashing waves, other times a smooth reflective surface. Then, as I went into the design stage, I took a few trips to Aberaeron, which is a beautiful little harbour town on the edge of Wales, to do some sketches of the boats, the harbour, the seagulls etc. It’s quite nice that a few people recognised Aberaeron when watching the film. 15

Fe wnes i dachre sgwennu’r stori ‘Leaf Boat’ yn ystod cyfnod pan oeddwn i mewn perthynas â dynes a oedd yn byw ar gwch camlas. Ond penderfynais ei gosod y ffilm ger y môr, oherwydd roeddwn i eisiau i’r awyrgylch adlewyrchu emosiynau mewnol fy mhrif gymeriad, Celyn, ac roeddwn i’n teimlo bod y môr yn fwy emosiynol weithiau tonnau enfawr yn chwyrlio ac yn berwu, weithiau’r dŵr yn llyfn fel wyneb drych. Yna, wrth imi dylunio’r cefnduroedd, es i i Aberaeron sef dref harbwr fach hardd i wneud rhai brasluniau o’r cychod, harbwr, gwylanod ac ati. Mae ychydig o bobl wedi adnabod Aberaeron wrth wylio’r ffilm. The style of ‘Leaf Boat’, in some ways, is very soothing and dream-like, and yet it tells a story of what can be a tumultuous and sometimes serious subject. How do you feel that the style of your animation interacts with the way love is represented in ‘Leaf Boat’?

Roedd lliwiau’n bwysig iawn i mi wrth wneud ‘Cwch Deilen’. Cyn imi roi enwau i’r cymeriadau, roeddwn i’n galw nhw’n ‘Oren’ a ‘Glas’ ac roeddwn i eisiau i’r cynllun lliw adlewyrchu’r cyferbyniad rhwng presenoldeb hyderus cynnes Heledd a chyflwr pryderus / amwys cŵl Celyn. Mae’r lliwiau hefyd yn newid wrth i’r stori fynd yn ei blaen o’r prynhawn, i fachlud haul, i nos, wrth i bethau fynd yn dywyllach ac yn fwy difrifol. Rwy’n credu bod fy steil yn eithaf naïf a syml ar y cyfan. Dwi wedi cael fy ysbrydoli llawer gan arddull y stiwdio animeiddio Wyddelig Cartoon Saloon sy’n I think in some ways the tynnu o waith celf process of making the Celtaidd cyntefig a’i osod yn yr oes fodern. film was quite useful in Yn eu ffilm ‘Song understanding myself and the of The Sea’ maent dynamics I can sometimes yn adrodd stori sy’n llawn hud ond hefyd find myself in ... I want gyda themâu eithaf my work to show that life trwm o alar yn cael is complicated and love is eu hadrodd mewn ffordd hyfryd o gynnil beautiful and inspiring, but i cynadlleidfa ifanc.

the loss of love can be hugely frightening and damaging

Colours were really important to me when making ‘Leaf Boat’. Before I had given the characters names, I just wrote them down as ‘Blue’ and ‘Orange’ and I wanted the whole colour scheme to reflect the contrast between the warm confident presence of Heledd and the cool anxious/ambivalent state of Celyn. The colours also change as the story progresses from afternoon to sunset to night time, as things become darker and more serious. I think my style is generally quite naive and simple. I am super inspired by the style of the Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon who draw from primitive Celtic artwork and set it in modern day. In their film ‘Song of The Sea’ they tell a story full of magic nawr

but also with quite heavy themes of grief told in a beautifully subtle way for children.

Is love essentially a sort of getting-lostness? And if so, does love have a fixed place or is it love that complicates the idea of stable places/identities? I think I am in the process of learning and discovering how love and relationships work for myself. I think in some ways the process of making the film was quite useful in understanding myself and the dynamics I can sometimes find myself in. I think love can be represented quite frequently in films as simple, like the happy ending at the end of every Disney film, whereas I want my work to show that life is complicated and love is beautiful and inspiring, but the loss of love can be hugely frightening and damaging,

especially if you are a person who has experienced loss or trauma in your past. It can take a huge amount of bravery to put yourself in the vulnerable position of loving someone. I don’t know if this is too personal a thing to say, but I’ve just been through a break up so I guess I am still learning how to build a safe and cozy leaf boat. Rwy’n credu fy mod yn y broses o ddysgu sut mae cariad a pherthnasoedd yn gweithio i mi fy hun. Rwy’n credu bod y broses o wneud y ffilm yn eithaf defnyddiol fel ffordd o ddeall fy hun a’r ddeinameg gallaf cael fy tynnu i mewn i weithiau. Rwy’n credu bod cariad yn cael ei gynrychioli mewn ffordd syml iawn yn amal mewn ffilmiau, er engraifft, pob diweddglo gan Disney. Dwi moen creu gwaith sydd bach yn fwy cymhleth. Yn enwedig os ydych wedi profi llawer o golled yn eich gorffennol, mae’n gallu bod yn hynod o frawychus i agor lan eich calon unwaith eto i rywun newydd. The metaphor of the boat is so beautiful, and the way Heledd and Celyn craft a stronger, more secure boat at the end is a really profound expression of love. How do you

think that this kind of ‘work’ comes into love as a whole? I think love is a feeling which shifts and changes with time. At the beginning it is often very passionate and over time grows more gentle. It’s such a wonderful feeling when you are ‘falling’ for someone, but in order to sustain a relationship I think there is a degree of work in order to build trust and communication. It takes compromise and acceptance. To create a relationSHIP which doesn’t sink you might need to fit it with a life ring because you’ve got no idea what life might throw at you and what stormy seas you might encounter. Rwy’n credu bod cariad yn deimlad sydd yn newid dros amser. Ar y dechrau mae’n teimlo’n cyfrrous ac yn hudol ac ar ôl typyn o amser mae’n teimlo’n fwy ymlaciedig a chyfforddus. Mae’n deimlad mor rhyfeddol pan rydych yn ‘cwympo’ am rywun, ond mae rhaid hyfathrebu’n dda er mwyn cynnal perthynas hir dymor. Gall gymryd cyfaddawd a derbyniad i greu perthynas sydd ddim yn suddo.

I love the way you have captured love’s playfulness. The “DO YOU WANT A CUPPA” moment is so fun - and pretty Welsh too! I would love to hear more about the sea creature, which initially emerges as a threatening figure but turns into something very different by the end. What is the significance of this character?

I have recently made another short film in collaboration with Hanan Issa called ‘Blodeuwedd’s Gift’, which imagines that Blodeuwedd from the Mabinogi is still stalking the streets today, shapeshifting between woman and owl, protecting her fellow women from harm on the streets of a city. It’s going to be released on BBC iPlayer soon. My dream is to one day write my own children’s The sea creature represents Celyn’s book, or TV series or feature film! I just want unconscious which emerges from the depths to carry on animating and telling stories. of the sea as a huge threatening monster ready to swallow the leaf boat whole! Yn ddiweddar, rwyf wedi creu ffilm fer arall However, Heledd recognises that this is a very mewn cydweithrediad â Hanan Issa o’r enw frightened part of Celyn that has emerged ‘Blodeuwedd’s Gift,’ sy’n dychmygu bod because Celyn is feeling unsafe and so offers Blodeuwedd (o’r Mabinogi) yn dal i fyw the monster a cup of tea to help soothe her. heddi ac yn crwydro’r strydoedd yn y nos yn When she does this, the monster shrinks in trawsnewid rhwng siap menyw a thylluan, size and becomes quite a cute little creature ac yn amddiffyn ei chyd-ferched rhag trais. who joins them for a cup of tea. I think of Bydd yn cael ei ryddhau ar BBC iplayer this as a metaphor with my relationships/ yn fuan. Fy mreuddwyd yw ysgrifennu friendships with others - often angry parts gyfres deledu neu nofel graffeg! Dwi eisiau of ourselves are actually defending a much parhau i animeiddio ac adrodd straeon. smaller frightened self which just needs a safe space to come out and feel heard and accepted. Mae creadur y môr yn cynrychioli isymwybod Celyn sy’n dod allan o’r ddyfnderoedd fel anghenfil enfawr bygythiol, yn barod i lyncu’r cwch deilen yn gyfan! Mae Heledd yn sylweddoli bod hwn yn rhan ofnus iawn o Celyn sydd wedi dod i’r amlwg oherwydd bod Celyn yn teimlo’n anniogel, ac felly mae’n cynnig paned i’r anghenfil i helpu ei gysuro. Pan mae hi’n gwneud hyn, mae’r anghenfil yn crebachu o ran maint ac yn dod yn greadur bach eithaf ciwt sy’n ymuno â nhw am baned. Rwy’n meddwl am hyn yn aml - mae rhannau grac ohonom yn amddiffyn darnau ofnus, sydd jyst angen lle diogel i ddod allan iddo ac i deimlo ein bod yn cael ein clywed a’n derbyn. Trwy cysuro’r rhan grac, crëir y gofod i ddangos beth sy’n diwgydd o dan y wyneb. What other projects are you working on and what can we expect to see from you in the future? nawr

Watch Efa’s ‘Leaf Boat’ online on BBC iPlayer.

Thank you to Efa for kindly providing the Welsh translation of their responses in this interview. Find more of Efa’s work on Instagram at @efabm.

Storm Bella, 2020

A rainbow plumes from your valley, lustrous and proud, stretched between us – clouded hill from clouded hill. Sun-low in my morning plaits, lips still swollen from our kiss. The Christmas lights pulsed as we glutted wine and you took me under the tree, turned me, to say, you are not available for love, then folded to all fours, pleasure – cripples us, wrists clutched. Bodies in every bauble – a stag on an angel, tied to this crux. The storm suits you – the strange romance of impenetrable rain, slip of the road, beat on the glass. Walking to your car, Bella’s easing force, calm from the roar, winter’s dawn still far. Morning’s rainbow – so leaden without you.

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Babygrow

They didn’t phone me on the ward or send a nurse. I just arrived, stooped at the incubator, and found him – buttoned into a faded baby grow, legs like wilted stalks. His barely born skeleton was lost to me, sleeping in a farmyard story – that I did not choose. And everything birthing out of my birth bag, everything that I could not use, was what I chose to argue with first. I should be the one stealing strokes of his skin, explaining the sheep on the patch, slipping him in, guiding limbs. Celebrating this act! Instead, I smooth the velvet tufts at the back, wipe bubbles from his nose, watch him swim – slow in a box of air. Sun like water from the skylight cross. Baby – with your world cuff stamped, loose at your foot, I’m waiting, my timeless Jesus.

poems by GUINEVERE CLARK 21

IN THE END

You must come down from the mountain: The gravity of family and friends, Even bells at dawn are not enough; No matter how much meditation There are humdrum matters of accounting. You can gaze long from the summit And believe the town tiny With all its petty ways: The ashes of existence Which appeared to mean everything.

IT’S A SONG

But messages will reach you Urgent or imploring, disturbing The solitude of the forest, Helicopter’s sound and searching beam. In the end, you come down from the mountain.

It’s a song which has found its singer Poem whose end is its beginning Dance of the dalliance of the birds Theatre whose voices ring again like bells Painting observed from the clouds Sculpture shaped by the tides A film of the underwater village Novel begun in sleeplessness An instrument played by the wind Tale told by an old woman in a dream A concerto for rain and trees.

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HOW TO SKIM

My grandchildren (as one flings stones into a stream with a ‘Plop!’) I will teach you how to skim one day on a stoney beach, to choose the right one flat and light nestle it in the C of your throwing hand, crouch low, swing back in a gentle rhythm bounce it across the surface counting the times as I once did on the banks of the Ystwyth, or Tanybwlch when the waves died down awhile – I will teach you something eminently useless to hold you there longer with the sun’s lowering, something you too can grip, pass on and, you never know, remember.

poems by MIKE JENKINS 23

RUBEN LORCA Selected Artworks

During a hospital stay after a traffic accident in which I suffered the amputation of my left leg, I began to create a series of illustrations with materials I had at my disposal. The product of a month of admission was a sequence of paintings reflecting the trauma I experienced following the irreplaceable loss. The work echoed the effects of the medicinal drugs and hallucination, the harsh reality and presence of nurses, family members and other patients. I created incomplete bodies, faces, hands, arms, individuals all reflecting physical and mental deficiencies. The medical healing material — graphite, surgical tape and scalpel blades — set up the relationship between mental suffering and art as a way to personal healing. Some works complement each other, they are part of a puzzle that can never be completed because human beings long for what they do nothave. The subtle lines have a careful anatomy and appear floating on an aseptic paper, as on an operating table. The final work is a swarm of vibrant, living forms that demand the attention of those who observe them, seeking communication, association, help and love, because art prevails as an expression of the human being, over stigma.

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Work

BETH SY’N DIGWYDD?: The Water-Bearer I want you to know I’m a mirrorball I’ll show you every version of yourself tonight I’ll get you out on the floor Shimmering beautiful And when I break it’s in a million pieces Extract from: Taylor Swift, Mirrorball. In, Folklore (2020) ---Last week I bought a pair of pyjamas. I chose them because they have shiny pink flamingos on the t-shirt, all floating in a square of kaleidoscopic water. Underneath, glossy letters spell out the words ‘team pool’, and when I think about it, this sentiment has always been true for me. I spent the majority of my teenage years in a pool, following the lines on the ceiling, looking for the red-and-blue of the flags, submerged and counting strokes. When I list the practicalities it sounds a bit dull, but the water was definitely my first love. The sensation of being almost weightless; gliding through the water, creating and moving currents; your breath forming soft, unworried bubbles – that feeling of clarity was unmatched. But maybe moulding the water into the shape of a muse is dangerous territory. Because the water can resemble a mirror, its surface refracting and transforming reflections as it glints in the sun. This metamorphosis is something I experienced the next few times I fell in love. It was as if the quiet solitude I had learnt and loved in the water was screaming out for something larger than life. Every time it happened, I would lap up the confidence, exuberance and noise reflected back at me. As the water shone brighter its surface would dazzle and ripple – and eventually, inevitably, quietly I saw all the pieces of myself fold in on each other. Like a screaming voice that’s submerged, my own reflection was lost and silenced. For a while I’d be the water-bearer. I’d follow the path of my Aquarius myth, keeping whoever I loved hydrated, whilst my own body lay withered in the sun. Eventually nothing would be left for me to absorb in the reflections I saw and small cracks would crawl across my body. I’d break and see the cloudy pieces of my reflection resurface gasping for air. ----A man is moon to his own sea – he draws it after him, like a dog it follows him the days of his life. All that night I heard the sea make and ebb, a sea formed nawr

Time passes and eventually the water of grains of remembered oceans, fed by rains and rivers has healed you. It’s of days I had finished with. soft particles have It carried old sticks in its mouth. In the morning a tide’s detritus, washed over your twigs, small round stones, a can, silhouette; slowly lay in uneven lines on the charred grass. and calmly the shattered fragments Extract from: Leslie Norris, A Sea in the Desert. In, Poetry 1900-2000: One hundred ----ii

poets from Wales (Parthian, 2007), pp. 266-267

Time passes and eventually the water has healed you. It’s soft particles have washed over your silhouette; slowly and calmly the shattered fragments of your reflection are brought back to you on it’s current. They creak into place, lower, then settle. You breathe a sigh of relief. You swear to yourself you’ll never be the water-bearer again. But of course, those past loves return occasionally too. They’ll turn up at your front door, baring the resemblance of ‘twigs, small round stones, a can’. First this will startle you; you’ll fumble at the insides of your skull, wondering why the water would bring you the sharp memories you told it to take away. But as the tide eases itself down the shore, the spume and spray tickles at your skin. Lingering – cold and refreshing – it pauses: “Don’t you know the water runs through you? I am you and you are me. When the light shone through us we appeared warped but the phases of the moon are never-ending. They bring the past and the future with every rotation. This is as normal as the ebb and flow of the sea”. ---The sun hung in the sky like a sticky marble, As we floated seamlessly in endless blue Weightless and beyond reproach, I learned to breathe anew Suspended in perfect equilibrium, Between the earth and the moon’s pull ---iii

Rhys Meredith (2020)

Tomorrow I will swim again in the pool where I spent so many hours as a teenager. But now you’ll come with me and I’ll be reminded of the poem you wrote about us floating in the Maltese sea. I will glide through the water and my mind will be clear. Love for me, has always lived poetically. Whether it be in a song or a stanza or a story – I hear the echoes of my past selves and past relationships automatically and unavoidably. The art around me draws me into and out from what I love. But now I realise – love doesn’t need to be the grand narrative I learnt in Taylor’s SuperStar. The water doesn’t need to swell and rise, crashing into a piercing crescendo. It can lull and meander, a constant oasis at your side.

by MILLIE BETHEL, Culture Writer 29

Soup

You are the pure potatoes, the water spiced and herbed; The carrots pulled from the earth, and the celery hearts, The sweet onions and the secret kiss of chilli. You are a bowl filled with perfect care, An embrace of soft flavour and steam. You are soup: half drink, half food, complete pleasure. Asheghetam

KEVIN DYER

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Y Bont

We’re in a spot where things come to an end: people cross or leap. We lie with fancy cakes and fizz clinking our year goodbye. What takes us to this precipice, we can amend… Tell the new girl, to shift all her cases out of our place. Pay back her ‘month up front.’ She should start her term in another street, we’ll stay in ours, complete. What replaces where we danced here? Memories and echoes? You’ll be in London, I'll watch the phone and walk past lit windows that were our home, listening to laughter I’ll share no more without you. So cross the bridge and say it: Stay. There is a toll. So what? We’ll pay it.

NICHOLAS MCGAUGHEY 31

TRACY LEONARD Selected Photographs

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TRACY LEONARD is a social documentary photographer based in the Rhondda, South Wales.

Explaining Love

My heart is full-up so I keep All the spare books of love, nearby On my bookshelves. She pats her ribs. I can swap the books when-ever I want, And set the heart-love down on my shelves. That way, my heart doesn’t overflow And nobody is left out. I take her hand as I guide her across the road, Small legs scurrying to keep up, Big heart rotating books as she waves With delight at the man from Asda. God, how much, how much she is going to teach me.

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Caru*

Shredded leaves nest in my pocket Taken with determination on our daily walk Then forgotten in the moment they are found, Left to live and die with me. You see a bag ripe for filling, throw in water, an oat bar, a plastic princess, colours, raisins, worries, wishes. I add pens, wipes, gel, and a need to hold on to the everyday of your face, the desire to re-live it all, each moment that’s gone and to still let you grow. You take out my things to make room for more wishes. Funny, I know. You fill my life up with the pieces of you. I carry you achos dwi’n caru ti.** Ac, oherwydd dwi’n caru ti,*** you carry me.

* (Love), * Because I love you ***And because I love you

poems by RHIANNON OLIVER 35

Ruben Lorca Edited by Anna Bland, Jamie Davies and Martha O’Brien. Designed by Anja Quinn. All work is copyrighted to the author or artist. © nawr mag 2021

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