The New Cardiff

There is a lot of building going on around the station in Cardiff.  It is a city springing, renewing itself, out of the darkness and coal and industry and steel and docks of previous years.  

When I was there in the 1970s Cardiff was a very different city.  The one I visited today has some very shiny new parts.

One of my favourite poets is Gillian Clarke, a poet of Wales and Cardiff and I love her poetry.  One of the most resonating is "East Moors"  which talks of the demolition of the steel works which could be seen from the street in Penylan in Cardiff where I lived when I was a student.  The power of progress...

East Moors


At the end of a bitter April
the cherries flower at last in Penylan.
We notice the white trees and the flash
of sea with two blue islands beyond
the city, where the steelworks used to smoke.
 
I live in the house I was born in,
am accustomed to the sudden glow
of flame in the night sky, the dark sound
of something heavy dropped, miles off,
the smell of sulphur almost natural.
 
In Roath and Rumney now, washing strung
down the narrow gardens will stay clean.
Lethargy settles in front rooms and wives
have lined up little jobs for men to do.
At East Moors they closed the steelworks down.
 
A few bitter men stay to see it through.  Theirs
the bitterest time as rolling mills
make rubble.  Demolition gangs
erase skylines whose hieroglyphs
recorded all our stories.
 
I am reminded of that Sunday
years ago when we brought the children
to watch two cooling towers
blown up, recalling the appalling void
in the sunlight, like a death.
 
On this first day of May an icy
rain is blowing through this town,
quieter, cleaner, poorer form today.
The cherries are in flower in Penylan.
Already over East Moors the sky whitens, blind.