Magu Hiraeth

It’s not the land of my father, or his father either, nor the land of my mother and her people, but Pen Llŷn is a land they knew well, the land I first came to sixty years ago in the womb, and came again and again, season upon season, legs lengthening, blue-eyed and burning skin, wandering on Mynydd Mawr, watching the currents ramping round Ynys Enlli, tickled and prickled by the same gorse and brushed by the same damp bracken where the adders hid on Anelog’s slopes, long days squeaking the sands with feet free, a prelude to late tea beneath the porcelain on the dresser.

Sights and sounds familiar as the inner metronome calling when I’m away, calling me, an outsider but no stranger, visitor but no tourist, a friend I hope to the land of your fathers and mothers ... and, for all this, the land of song inflects me with music as you hear.

Between 2007-2022, two waves of writing connect villages at either end of Pen Llŷn:

Aberdaron, my earliest love, westermost tip, its beach-side church of stone and timber filled with sea-light and the remembered voice of the poet-preacher; my mind’s eye settles upon the heron alone in a pool left by the receding tide; and I see again the winding-gear skeletons at Porth Ysgo, the gull-camped islands in the bay, and, from Uwychmynydd, the isolated Ynys Enlli rising from the water, last resting place before the sea becomes the unbroken horizon; and Trefor, my newer home, eastermost gateway by “the etemal eroding sea” at Yr Eifl’s foot (as poet Brian Morris felt it), the heights above surveying all Pen Llŷn (as those at Tre’r Ceiri did before), and the carved mountain testament to a century of stonecraft that kept the village, sustained its band and choirs, filled its chapels and school, and made busy its pier.

Myriad memories in and of this land, rippling out, lighting upon places and people, the sights and sounds of adopted home. Memories and music.

Even the best of second language users are tricked occasionally by a turn of phrase, a quirk of grammar, an untranslateable; so, too, acquired nostalgia and the yearning for home, even when the learning began in the womb, will always be incomplete, sometimes fragmentary, often phantom. Nonetheless, it can be fully sensed, become embodied, all of this despite being second. It is what it is, no more no less. Magu hiraeth ...