Poetry on Sunday

Sarah Persson

One of the many brilliant things about living in Llantwit Major is the sense of creative community.  Although this week’s poem isn’t based in Wales, it is founded in current Welsh culture.

In the summer, local visual artist, Nick Davies, invited poetic responses to the neolithic stone circle of ‘Merry Maidens’ near St Buryan in Cornwall as part of a collaboration. The story behind this particular stone circle is that the stones were once nineteen maidens dancing on a Saturday night.

However, despite the pipers running away when they heard the bells strike midnight, the maidens continued to dance into the Sabbath and were therefore turned to stone as punishment.

This work in progress show the layers that appear in Nick Davies’ work, which represent time and movement. It is part of a collaborative series of combined paper cut designs with woven texts exploring the stone circles.  The intention is to feature interwoven texts that represent a connection to ‘binding’ – a term found within witchcraft phraseology.

moon merging women dancing on grass

nineteen of us raining

strumming on quartz

we

arch and stretch

the course of the sky

its false

paths in loops

lost

riding the dusk

the discs of our fists

howl

like the dead on

the curve of the hills

soft

spheres of breasts are

lit by the smooth-edged

moon

we dance damp in the dew globes

see our faces in them

but

we pulse  too wild to

stop

the earth surges through us

but

our limbs become

boulders

as the damned morning

orbits

our sunrise condemns us