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BALD MAN ON BALD MOUNTAIN
Reproduced with kind permission from Mike Jenkins -Welsh Poet & Author blog
Top of Bald Mt. Photo by Dave Lloyd.
If you go on a trek up Bald Mountain in the Adirondacks National Park, NY State, you have to sign a book to say you've left. I went there with my friend Dave Lloyd and his family but never signed out. I sincerely hope the Rescue Services aren't still looking for my bald pate camouflaged perfectly against the bare rocky surfaces you have to clamber up and slide down.
In some ways, however, I do feel I'm still up there!
I'm drinking in that refreshingly cool breeze like water from a spring and gazing around in amazement at the forests and lakes spread out into the distance : a sense of space without borders.
I haven't come down yet and my dreadful experience at the Stephens & George Charitable Trust so-called ArtsFest in Merthyr only made me mentally want to stay there, eye-flying above those colours of the Fall, so many yellows, reds and browns I couldn't name them.
(The dark forces of anti-literature were out in force when the organiser and her assistant dressed up in black well before Hallowe'en managed to create a non-event I have rarely witnessed before. She was so skilled in the dark arts that she disappeared into thin air just when I was about to give her flak!)
So now I'm seeking the up-currents with the hawks, high over glacier-scooped lakes and ice-smoothed outcrops.
The USA is astonishingly beautiful and also sadly tragic.
For every sun going down over mysterious green water, there is an Arnold; the man we encountered at a bus-stop in downtown Portland.
He gripped a plastic bottle of piss-coloured liquid, occasionally taking a slug.He jabbered incessantly and manically about being in the toilet when somebody broke his arm and how he was determined 'to kill someone'.
Dirty and dishevelled, yet it was his tone which was threatening. His eyes were sunk in two wells, with no ropes to escape only the endless echoes of past voices blaming, cursing, full of hate.
Abandoned by a system which simply didn't bother, like so much of our 'care in the community' over here today.
And for every writer like Dave Lloyd and sculptor like his wife Kim Waale - trying to forge a unique way of expression which does not worship the ego - there is the other side of 'art'. There are those who operate strictly within genres with an eye to film rights, masters of online marketing and self-promotion. At Wordstock Festival we even met a film-maker who was looking for a book with graphic scenes of torture in it.
For every gas-guzzling SUV-owning flag-flaunting citizen, there are sensitive poets like Pat Lawler of Le Moyne College, a writer at the forefront of environmental activism, trying to expose the madness of the rush for shale gas , which will soon hit us here.
It was entirely predictable that the USA's first tentative steps towards a free health care system - at least for the poorest people - should be met with such animosity by Tea Party Republicans.
Any real progress towards a genuine Welfare State seems slow, even as Westminster moves alarmingly in the direction of an American system which fails to support its most vulnerable citizens.
Yet I learned that in Oregon there was a state bank and Portland had an office and cafe for the International Workers of the World (the 'Wobblies'), founded in the States with the objective of abolishing capitalism.
The USA's socialist past is a bit like England's republicanism (with a small 'r') : buried for a reason.
Going there I was supposed to feel more European, to possess an increased solidarity with the Continent and its weight of history.
In fact, I felt just as much (or as little) at home in America as I had in Italy ; perhaps more so, given the language and the over-riding influence of its culture on me for so long.
I kept reflecting back on Cymru and how such a new , ever-changing democracy as ours could be so limited in its powers.
If Obama was incensed by the needless shut-down, then what of our Senedd, at present so burdened by pointless austerity measures which will have a lasting and disastrous affect on so many, from the closure of libraries to the bedroom tax.
The more I became aware that the US Empire with its fracking, excessive capitalism and self-righteous patriotism only represents one side of that country, the more I became convinced of the importance of small and creative nations trying to express themselves in a world which seeks to flatten everything.
Not a Cymru preserved and bottled - as I experienced in the old Welsh community of Remsen in upstate NY, where 'y ddraig goch' was a mere emblem and chapel-going and Cymanfa Ganu still a way of life - not this , but a country modern and out-going , while still respecting its history and traditions.
I am not lost on Bald Mountain, just hovering awhile and when I finally come to ground I will find myself back on the Waun rejoicing the wonders of bracken and heather over those 19th century tips ; celebrating the fact that, at least here, they will never have to quarry for coal, to cut and blast and destroy so much.
BALD MAN ON BALD MOUNTAIN
I will always be there on Bald Mountain,
I never signed out
but no-one will be checking
a wandering, bald Welshman
adopted by brown bears, or eaten by them!
always there in the climb
along the whale-back elephant skin
of smoothed out erratics,
trying for a foot-hold on exposed roots
with forehead veins pumping strain
there in early Fall leaf-cover
in gentle company and reminscences,
dog-walkers exchanging breed conversations,
all the way up to meet the sun
and cooling breeze from the mountains
always a signature yet not missing,
balancing on dry rock ledges
back to a boy on storm beaches,
up to the shaky fire look-out
and forest distance, no walls or fences
there a stranger yet following
together as 'leaf peepers' our senses
knowing brittle colours of another leaving
and the stories of the lakes
deeper than we could dream.
I should point out that Oregon does not currently have a State bank although a petition for one was qualified recently. It may or may not make it onto the ballot. The only state in the US which currently has a State bank is North Dakota:- North Dakotas State-Run Bank Adds Millions to Treasury, Spurs Imitators