Two Poems by Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch

Summer Holiday

We do not have to do this but it’s July and hot
and we have reached the beach below the little flat
we’ve rented for the week, so now must show
how much we are enjoying ourselves.
Let’s lie side by side on the sand, an inch apart,
nothing touching, let our small son bury us
one by one together because we are as good as dead
inside. We have spent the morning building castles
that have been kicked, toppled or contorted by water.
So why not hand ourselves over so the sand can
cover us, so we can feel the stream of blessed
mineral and quartz glitter over us through
our son’s open palms until we are at peace
under a hot blanket of sand. He is sculpting us
into undulating mini Saharas, creating of us
a new landscape, joining us together by patting
the final handfuls first on your body then mine
as if to say now you are truly mummified
and daddified. Sand has the capacity to reveal,
cover, shift, stick, to warm, to turn into sludge.
We agreed some time back to be yoked for life
so we may as well be held by this bed of sand,
talking heads. Sand has that way of staying
with you long after you leave the beach —
in sandwiches, your towel, your bag,
and in your shoes for weeks. If either of us
moves the cracks will show. Shall we lie here
and wait for the tide to arrive? Either way
we are up to our necks in it.

Miners’ Fortnight

They’d pay eight shillings for the room:
a bed, a bolster, two blankets and a glass
of water on the nightstand. But the sheets
remained unslept in the whole of August

because the miners preferred the pier’s
patchwork of browns and purples sewn together
with thrift. What they’d do was to sleep
on the quay every night to shake

the sediment of a thousand-year-old forest
from their lungs, layers of dead wood compressed
into coal beds. These men who’d breathe
coal dust from dawn to dusk would

settle down along the pier like a human seam.
It wasn’t the stone that kept them there, but the air.

Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch has published three collections and three pamphlets. Her work has been shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year, the Michael Marks Award and the Roland Mathias Prize. She's currently working on her next collection.