From the author of Baedd And Other Poems, Twm Gwynne.

The Village of the Net Weavers

The village of the net weavers is

Beautiful in dew or dancing rain,

Delicate homes-as-hunting-grounds catching

Drops, strung out like music.

Their village is beautiful, spun out around

This old stump, worked into the failing

Grain, slow disintegration back to the

Claim, back to the dark ground

Where rot releases new terrain.

Their village is perfect, and unique, totally

Conforming to the unique place

Where the spinners weave their deadly lace.

This is instinct? Or intelligence?

Or do we not now have the words for the unspoken dance

By which the concept-gap is bridged

By thin strands of spider-silk?

This way of theirs goes on more or less unchanged

Across an endless flux of age.

Human communities seemed to know the same skill,

To, careful, bridge our need and place.

Hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, people

Woven skillful in the gifts of their landbase.

This path of being with, not being against,

Is urgently affirmed by churning seas and skies,

Burning earth, and weeping eyes.

There is no claim that can be made of right or wrong

Ways of being; only what endures,

And what will soon be gone.

Hard Eyes

I am performing the tight, silent

Language of maleness in the

Tension of my face

At all times.

I feel hardness in my eyes,

Low brow, grim lips,

Hard, mindful alignment of my hips.

If I dissolve the man in my face,

I don’t recognize the person standing in his place,

Having learned to hate the softness

That his fear had worked to erase.

Wainui Falls

Water rolls over stone at the top,

Spinning out like fresh feathers

That only grow to fall,

Grim in heavy cold, and fast.

Through the hole, portal, passage,

There’s the higher world that birthed the river,

Staring through spray to the cupped

Fingers of the hills,

Palm-ruts crinkling in rifts

Where the land’s hands are gathering rain.

Broken arms are open to the tender sky.

Then all boils in the cradle,

Crucible of bitter cold

Where waters churn like white clouds

Or the spinning mist around a valley-bowl.

All that’s left will form a twisting pillar and drive

Their storm of heavy feathers

Down on the brutal hammer stone below.

Wanting Water//Black Drum

Sometimes I've wanted you like

I want water,

Like the earth and I want water

In the hot dry months,

And just being with you, just touching you,

Is the bare sun, naked heat, and more

Desperation, single minded.

Storm clouds build in us both, in those months,

Thunderheads piling over the blue-distant hills:

Then I want only one thing.

To be with you till the clouds in us break, and rivers run in the earth again.

Bright sun gilds the green tree-leaves

Shining in their edges,

Haloed by the light, before the rushing dark.

Those wings spread, embrace

The wide horizon and smear the sky down,

Blur the distant mountains wide and stride over

The earth in yearning thirst.

Come like a cold, tempestuous lover

And drive the hard rain down.

Voice beats the air for a drum, beats with

Brutal roll of lightning streaks through the wavering

Trees, in the bend and creak

And sway before the gale,

Close your circle and give back the water,

Give back life to the lush earth.

The Pheasant Berries

When I was little I used to smear the juice of a small fruit,

Draping branches of hooded berries

Purple-black in mystery and promise,

On my penis, hoping it would wither.

I hated it in my guts,

And the sad-sick sense of wrongness,

Wishing for a womb, moon-cycled bleeding,

A different body to be born in.

I didn’t have words for it then,

I barely do now,

Now that the stooped, confused adult,

Tired of trying and failing to perform any role,

Has said they are nothing at all –

Nothing but someone who now knows the name of

The pheasant berries,

And tastes their burnt-black caramel

When they wish instead to hold that kid

And accept them for themself.

Twm Gwynne

Twm Gwynne is a queer animist, anarchist, organiser, gardener, and poet of mixed Welsh, Irish, and English descent living on Te Ika-a-Māui, Aotearoa. Their poetry has been featured in several journals including A Beautiful Resistance and Clarion, as well as the collection Flower Bombs: Poems of Love and Rage in the Anthropocene. A short collection of their work titled Baedd & Other Poems is available though the Ritona imprint of Gods & Radicals Press.

Twm Gwynne: The Village of the Net Weavers, and other poems