This weekend, the Trifecta team’s Trifextra challenge asks us to take a trip back in time to our school days, and write a haiku, on any subject.
I’ve spent this week in the fabulous countryside of Ceredigion (mid-Wales), and have been inspired. This afternoon, we watched red kites descend on the lake at Bwlch Nant Yr Arian, which is a nature reserve managed by the Forestry Commission and the RSPB (a charity dedicated to the care and conservation of bird life in the UK).
Anyway, here is my haiku – I do enjoy trying to convey feelings, thoughts and ideas in such a limited number of syllables (5-7-5).
Why not visit here to read all the other brilliant offerings?! Or, take part yourself….
I told them, over and over again ‘Don’t go down Glyndwr Street’. What a fool I was.
It was the summer holidays, a delightful oasis for them, a seemingly endless trial for me. I had run out of patience and shouted at them to get out of my hair.
The peace and quiet was such a relief.
Until they didn’t come back at tea-time, ransacking the kitchen cupboards for biscuits, crisps and orange squash.
I knew.
I ran as if wings had sprouted from my feet. I got there just in time to see them skipping off into the distance, holding hands. I stared as their shadows grew dark, as my darling girls faded and disappeared.
There they are now, forever embedded in the paving stones, together with remnants of the other careless souls.
It’s time for my latest offering to Lillie McFerrin’s Five Sentence Fiction, a weekly prompt where there is no word limit, just a limit on the number of sentences. Plus, although she provides a word prompt, it is just for direction only – you don’t have to include the word itself in your contribution.
This week, the prompt is – THUNDER.
Do let me know what you think of my offering below – and whilst you’re at it, why not take a look at everyone else’s offerings (I’m sure they’ll be fabulous), and even give it a go yourself…
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– Ysbryd y Mwynwyr –
If you lay your hands flat against the earth, you can feel the souls of the lost and the forgotten reaching out to you for recognition.
I feel that here, even on a cheerful day in August; the scars incised on the landscape, the tumbledown mine-workings, the iron ore spilling its livid orange hue over smooth stones ensconced in the glass-clear streams – these are the obvious markers of times past.
Pause for a moment, tune your ears to the undertow that pulls your heart, your thoughts, your very breath past the calm sounds of nature; beyond the brook burbling at your feet, beyond the birds soaring in the azure above your head.
This serene valley was once filled with the roar of vast waterwheels, smoke, steam, pounding hammers and picks, chipping and hacking and the shouting of men.
The thunder of industry echoed around these mountains; the clamour of humanity, the spirit of the miners, reverberates within us now, never to be lost.
Copyright – Freya
*** Ysbryd Y Mwynwyr is Welsh and means Spirit of the Miners. It is a community regeneration project that set out to create an identity for northern Ceredigion using the legacy of metal mining as a theme for regeneration. The project mainly focused on the human, social and community aspects of mining culture. In short, the very reason why many of the upland villages exist. Please see the Ysbryd Y Mwnwyr website for further information, and if you ever visit Wales, I can highly recommend the area as a region to visit. It is stunning.
