Two Poems by Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch

Crane

Can it be two years since we welcomed the crane
to this ribbon of peninsular, our much-missed crane?

What greater herald of summer is there, excepting
swifts weaving through eaves, besides the crane?

It’s all arm and claw growling over the quay
to dip its jaw in the water, blessed crane.

Grus Grus migrate 500 miles a day. Ours
stays three days a year being a land-based crane.

How does this yellow dinosaur remain stable?
It unfolds its limbs to shouts of Stand back in case! Crane!

They weigh two tonnes apiece, but each yacht that swings
in its cradle is bathed then embraced by the crane.

Our boats journeyed through hail and rain all year
tied to the pier awaiting the reappearance of the crane.

Mantha survived the virus. But don’t lower the boats
of the dead, as you’ve already guessed, crane.

Deathwatch

Who is that tapping? Who’s trying to get through
to us five brothers keeping watch all night through?

The call of insect morse is insistent drilling which
our dying dad has known his whole life through.

The sheets that bandage his thin limbs and white
beaked head to the bed are soaked right through.

He looks like Old Father Time, who has stopped ticking
in the four poster beetles have chewed through.

Like aristocrats, death watch beetles prefer the aged oak
of landed estates and warm nights in June to mate through.

These rafters, already 400 years dead were home
to forest birds for 200 years straight through.

The beetles’ teeth chisel closer. Dad’s dentures
rattle in a glass when one of us tries to tiptoe through.

This panelled room contains him like a coffin
the beetles have started eating through.

As his ninety years diminish to minutes it’s hard to think
this man will become a habitat for others to root through.

Given they outnumber us Rodericks fifty to one,
let’s leave the lodgers be the next decade through.

Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch’s work has been shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award (2014), the Roland Mathias Prize (2013), and Wales Book of the Year (2009). Her poems were highly commended in the Forward Prizes in 2009 and 2013 and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3. In 2012 she won a Leverhulme Writer in Residence Award and in 2015 an Arts Council Creative Wales Award. Samantha is studying at the Sorbonne and rewilding a field on a cliff edge in west Wales.