The rivers running through my life. The very first ones, Rheidol and Ystwyth and their meeting-point at Aberystwyth.   We would play for hours beside them on their gravelly beaches, skimming stones in competitions and even trying to catch fish with improvised rods made from sticks and string.

  Reaching the sea at Tanybwlch : storm-beach on whose huge boulders I'd leap playing 'Basques'.   I'd seen a film about the Basque people living in the mountains and always thought of them as agile mountain folk who could jump from rock to rock like mountain goats!

   Then on to Cambridge and the Cam a very different beast. Brown and slow and murky-mysterious and though I did swim in the designated area a few times, we mostly kept well away.

   It was for students and visitors to punt along, while we relished the outdoor pool adjacent to it. And its smaller sister, the Granta, was tea at Granchester with my mother busy quoting Rupert Brooke. But mostly it was swatting away pesky wasps. Now I think of Pink Floyd sampling its sounds and the fact that the great Syd Barrett could have passed close by, when I lived in that area.

   When we later moved into the countryside and further along the river, it became a place of contrasts : of lust and poetry. On the banks it was all kiss and touch with a local girl I'd met at a disco. But we were always open to prying eyes and one so-called friend would invariably sing -  'He was born with wandering hands!' at me in a Lee Marvin growl!

   Alone, I'd nestle in the long grass and delve into Eliot's 'Four Quartets', not caring a jot if I couldn't decipher them, letting the imagery seep into my subconscious. The river was usually sluggish here and one of its many tributaries passed through the house of the local Tory MP.

   Years later, when my wife and I lived in Rheinberg, W.Germany, the Rhine ran by the town, the most powerful river I'd ever encountered. We travelled north to see its many pleasure cruisers and south to see its weight of trade and vineyards high up on the hillsides.

   In the 70's the worst feature of the Rhine was its pollution and you could see why the Green Party soon became very popular there. There were jokes that you could light your cigarette on it and they were frighteningly close to the truth. Along one stretch were many channels designed to divert the chemical foam. This was the other side of W.Germany's prosperity : a total disregard for the environment.

   Born in the mountains, the level lands of northern Germany and East Anglia never felt like home. When we eventually settled in Merthyr, the Taf began to flow through my days. The many train journeys down to Cardiff would follow its course, past collieries at Abercynon and Merthyr Vale. There was the sheer force of its waters in flood , as well as its history like a black snake of liquid coal.

   During the 30 years and more we've lived here, the Taf has changed radically, becoming less prone to flooding and so much cleaner. Herons and kingfishers have returned in numbers and even cormorants at Radyr weir. Councils have become more fish-friendly, with most providing salmon-ladders for their long arduous journeys.

   It's a river of remarkable dichotomies from north to south. As a keen Geography  student at school I was always fascinated by their life-cycles and analogies with human growth. Considering the Taf Fechan at Pontsarn and the 'old age' river as it meanders towards Cardiff Bay brings back those lessons which caught my imagination then.




Journey of the Taf




It begins in the centre
of a mountain,
waters breaking.

Nobody can say
exactly where
I come from :
parents Earth and Water
and the midwife Air.
Soon Fire, the sun
and everything
I feed upon.

This place of summits
called a watershed :
tears as light
stings my eyes.

I am just a stream
a nant, a toddler
finding my way
downslope, over the edge
of my mother
and with my father's constant
push of rain.

One like many others
till I start to cut teeth,
to haul stones
to erode the bed
and banks into a gorge.

I'm moving quicker
with steeper gradient,
my veins pulse
with the thrust of water
like a salmon at the point
of a journey across the world.

Soldiers with back-packs
and booted outward-bounders.
fight against my movement,
believing it's a challenge.

The children who paddle
squeal, splash and fling
their stones, sound like
an echo in my bones.

The Sun, my teacher,
comes and goes
promising destinations
and then, dips down low;
so any season
I could be bellyfull
or parched to a trickle.

Sheep sip clear water
heads bowed as in prayer
to a lost mother ;
or they're dead weight,
blood mingling with light,
soon a veil of flies.

Winding and wending around
scarp and spur
I reach a sudden drop,
a ledge of resistant rock:
the descents of childhood
then youth when greys
and blues and browns
become a frothing white ;
into the devil's punchbowl
and a whirling might.
Here secret swimmers come
to shed their many skins
and exuberant leapers
plunge into a scream
and come out laughing.

I am joined by others.
by brothers and I'm 'Fawr'
to their 'Fechan',
they emerge on the scene
demanding confluences,
driving deep into chasms
before we're all lost
in a man-made lake :
they term it 'llyn'
but it is reservoir,
a store of water
we are schooled into
( even in most vivid reflections
we wear our grey uniforms ).

I straighten, I widen,
my girth held by bridges
and above are viaducts
which span into another age.
Rocky islets - trees and bushes
growing from them - bring doubts
as I begin to be fixed,
my route determined by walls
and a weir which parodies
the earlier waterfalls.

Now salmon struggle upstream,
as I welcome the many heron
whose measured wing-beats
are like the peace I strive for
and the returning colours
of the kingfishers diving
like winged rainbows.

All this, as I am dumping-place
for trolleys, cans and bottles
like some cess-pit of the past,
some cholera-infested slum.

My parents seem so far away :
mountains aloof, quarried or conifered
and clouds that drop their load
then move on. They call me Taff
but I much prefer my Welsh name
(it’s what I call myself
and sounds like a stone’s edge).

Sometimes I seem to slumber along
all controlled by sluice and gate ;
sometimes I’m far too busy
to notice those who gaze
like seagulls on the bars,
or those who cavort in heat ;
too busy with the flow, the downward trek.

I have too many shadows :
rail and trail, the once canal,
higher up the road obeys the curve.
Each shadow more purposeful
to traffic and trade;
I begin to wonder
why I move in such haste
and whether I will be
beyond it all, lost.

There are so many white weeds
hanging in the trees,
fluttering like flags of surrender
sometimes falling and filling
into tumours on my surface.

Just as cormorants are fishing
so I begin to sense the sea.
Silt accumulates in my bed,
slows me down after years
of scraping and scouring;
I begin to meander,
to waver across the floor,
the buildings start to ignore
my presence and there are outpourings
secretive and poisonous
which seep into my limbs.

Becoming sluggish, my murky waters
of blurred vision in the suburbs.
I try to remember stretching terraces
where the only vines were children
spreading tendrils of imagination.

The mud is gathering,
the flood-plain’s a resting-place
for birds on their journey south.
Anglers wade out to tempt
the fish with threaded flies.
I yawn into the city
past a parkland of lovers
and solitary office-workers,
I am broad and straight now
without the energy of gradient.

The grand stadium looms
as if it were a ship of state,
but finds no reflection.
I have almost forgotten
the distant mountains I came from,
the fact I am water at all.

‘Afon’ is a slow way of saying ,
it seems to suit me better
than the rip of ‘river’.
Already I can feel the saltiness
creep into my body
and seagulls’ mocking calls
hover then swoop all day.

At the Bay, I’m trained and tamed.
On calmer days feel stagnant;
when there’s a restless breeze
I begin to wave and voices
of my ancestors come back :
‘Once you were black, all thick
with dust like a collier’s throat.
Once this was flats of mud
where waders and dippers
would pick for worms.’

Now I am becalmed,
waiting for the gates to open,
where I will lose my name.
It is a different sun,
one that threatens to burn up,
to leave me dispersed
into the Channel and after.

A roof of slate, façade of glass,
the twirling pipes of a carousel
all bring back reminiscences
of pebbles carried, reflections borrowed,
stirrings under a waterfall.

It is night-time and the moon
is whole and crying out
like a barn-owl over moorland.
I must go and never know
what will become of me.