Island of Lightning by Robert Minhinnick

Author:Robert Minhinnick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seren

Yusuf Omar (1918-1987) “was the last great traditional singer of the school of ‘Iraqi maqams’.”

The poem quoted occurs in the Baghdad sialect of Arabic and is an ancient popular lyrc, used in the ‘Maqam Hsseini’, “one of the seven fundamental maqams”, and recorded for Ocora radio France, 1996, as ‘Les Maqam de Baghdad’.

Cynffig

When the river reaches the sea it makes no fuss at all. There is no triumphal estuary, no saltmarsh or riverine flatland of grey glasswort. Simply a running over the cobbles and a low key disappearance. The landscape does not celebrate and the river refuses to exult. It is a small river with a corrupted name, a name older than the tree roots exposed in the dune walls, older even than its present course for this river has flowed several ways in its time.

Over the beach it runs, going quietly, its name the sound it used to make centuries ago, a gulp, a swallow, yet its consonants are still sharp against each other and a faultline divides its syllables. It is already a little brackish, poking its tongue into the ocean, a transfusion of warm effluent and acid snowmelt from the plantations on the hills behind.

When the twelve knights reached the river they stopped their journey. They decided there was a border that followed the river, up from the ocean and into the hills that gave little grazing and no grapes or honey, but sheltered a scattered people who chose to live in barren places. The knights built their fortress here close to the beach, and a town of a thousand souls grew about its walls, an important town that knew grapes and honey and poetry. Salmon were caught here, and trout whiskery as nettle flowers. Then the sand began to drift and the town was abandoned. The people moved away and history ceased. Sand was ruler now. It had settled in the wells and lapped the altar-stone. It smoked in the chancel and made minging rain. Out of the sea came the armies of sand, bloodying the air, their warcries of Chinese whispers. Yet the river still flowed and it remained a border. For the few travellers who came this way there was clearly a boundary here. The land changed; the air was different. When the travellers crossed the river they became different people.

Now I am neither one side of the border nor the other but amidst the border, the river on my skin, the water deeper, deeper as to be dangerous, befitting a border place. Fifty yards from shore the river is steeply banked and care is needed to withstand the wrestler, oiled and devious, that the current has become. The twelve knights could have grasped each others’ arms and made a bridge across the water. The wrestler would not have troubled them. But they never crossed. They did not seek change or a country without grapes and honey. In the banks I see tree roots, gnarled as the river name, holding up the ramparts of sand and keeping everything together.

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