On Being a Poet in Wales: The Poetry Beast
Xavier Panadès I Blas
With long, deliberate steps, he wandered into Cymru with salt in his beard and thunder in his chest — his coat lined with languages, his eyes attuned to the music of forgotten stories.
When he spoke, the air shifted — part thunderstorm, part rain. His tongue curled around the names of mountains and saints, poets and ghosts.
The locals began to call him The Poetry Beast, though not out of fear. There was no menace in him — only momentum, fire, and passion.
He was drawn to the stillness between the hills, to the untranslatable ache, the hiraeth. It reminded him the flickering of the olive trees, the yawn of the Mediterranean sky, and the warmth of the Sun.
Static
By day, he wandered the hills and coasts of Cymru, listening. To sheep calling through mist. To the hush of coal dust in abandoned tunnels. To chapel bells, static from distant radios, and the echoes of children laughing in two languages.
And by night, The Beast boldly blurred the lines between music and poetry, captivating audiences, with rhythms that roared and verses that burned. An invocation, a ritual—part sermon, part storm—where words danced on basslines and truth echoed louder than applause… a vessel of humanity.
Simply: poetry.
In a pub, halfway between misery and hope, he was struck by the sight of a face. A face marked by the scars of pain, suffering, and abuse. Yet, beneath it all, there was a smile—the smile of a child that had never died, one that had overcome the sharpest pangs of life’s cruelties.
The Poet’s Eyes
Purring an ancient song,
she rocked from side to side.
Amazed by the paleness of the moon, she moaned like a piano melody.
She had no one in the world,
only herself and her loneliness.
She would frown, when flooded
with sad episodes from the past.
If she caged her sleeping being,
it would rip the heavens to pieces.
Thus, she allowed wrong feelings
to govern her.
Cosmic wonders,
shone in her heart.
The fabric of wisdom,
ran through her mind.
She drowned all her dreams,
over a dark pond,
where the secret of her soul,
was captured by a nightmare.
In vain, were the attempts
to unfasten from her soul.
Welded to ancient illusions,
she couldn’t come back to reality.
There is no difference
between dreaming and waking.
She turns and turns in the darkness
of her beating heart.
She finds her being, waiting for her,
among the dark shadows of memory.
Between fragments of poetry and lines,
she is reborn, through the eyes of the poet…
Blood Shavings was conceived. Verses that bleed emotion and shimmer with raw beauty, unveiling the resilience of women. Each poem is a blade, carving a path to liberation from abuse, from silence, from the thick undergrowth of memory.
After the last verse, The Poetry Beast never returned to the pub. Disappeared in the mist of forgiveness. But the echo of his voice lingers. In the alleyways. in libraries, in the heart of Cymru…And if you listen carefully, you may still hear him — somewhere between a whisper and a storm.
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EU and rest of the World:
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