A poem on Sunday: Blodeuwedd by Sarah Persson
Sarah Persson
Each spring, my family visit Castle-Upon-Alun in the Vale of Glamorgan to have a picnic and see the bluebells.
A couple of years ago, my daughter was playing on the riverbank and there were shrieks from an unknown bird – suddenly everything felt magical and ancient.
It was as if Blodeuwedd were the flowers and plants all around us calling in an owl’s voice. As many people reading Nation.Cymru will know, Blodeuwedd is a mythological character from the fourth branch of the medieval stories of the Mabinogion.
Created out of flowers as a wife for Lleu Llaw Gyffes, she is unfaithful and plots to kill her husband. As punishment for this, Blodeuwedd is turned into an owl.
Blodeuwedd
Something prehistoric yells in the trees,
like an owl mourning flowers.
The Alun streams strange,
flowing up from the sea
bubbling back
back
to a girl
making mud men,
slippery on the clay banks.
She dreams in flowers, oak,
broom, bundles of nettles, meadowsweet
white daisies and bluebells.
A jealous boy throws rocks
Miss me
Miss me
Now you gotta
kiss me.
The stream swallows the shock of
them,
closes around the wounds
so quickly she wonders
if the rock was a trick of the light,
as if the story never happened at all
although the wall builds beneath the surface.
She adjusts the water,
pushes out posies on rafts of bark,
smooths herself with sunlight,
the rock in her heart
and an owl screeching.
Smooths herself with sunlight.
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Blodeuedd is strictly speaking, a character in the Mabinogi, an intricate work of mythology or literature (see my current series ‘Magnificent Mabinogi‘, on Nation Cymru). The Mabinogion is the title of a collection of mediaeval tales, which includes the Mabinogi. To remember which is which, the longer word (all 11 tales) includes the shorter word. I do not share many people’s delight and fascination with Blodeuedd. What many do not know is almost all the pretty flowers use in her manufacture, are poisonous. A mediaeval audience living in a farming society would hvae known this, so picked up the advance… Read more »