‘Uffern ar y Ddaear – Hell on Earth’

I’m surrounded by the smell of dead grass
dreaming of a machine that creates water from nothing.
Someone’s got the radio on too loud and always a baby is wailing.

I lift my nose and smell the smoke on the wind and my throat
is already whining for my master dead on the moors
like cottongrass, heather, butterfly, grasshopper,

where the battle that began on the first of May is still going on
between a fire ignited by one who belongs to the inferno
and the fire fighters with hoses, beaters, leaf blowers.

If only they could bring the rains and autumn winds,
summon them into a summer already too hot and too long,
where reservoirs empty and carbon reservoirs bake, burn, reignite.

I hear they’re trying to save the mast, 1000 feet high, which I saw
lit red like a warning sign beneath the full moon transmitting not only
radio, television for the BBC, ITV, C4, signals for mobile phones,

but some kind of howl we’ve somehow got used to between silences.
What if it goes down like the plane that crashed on the 27th of February
in 1958 when the snow was so cold no-one could rescue the 35 dead

who still roam the hill cursing the faulty radio signals and the drones
flying overhead in the way of the helicopter pouring its cauldron
of water from the reservoirs over the baking baking peat?

When the endless chatter ceases will everyone hear the howl
pouring the dead down Winter Hill like radio waves
from the spring where the Douglas starts

and the mourning song for Winter’s King
dead like a bog body amongst the burial mounds
beneath the burning feet of his rival who is ever victorious?

When we try to shut Hell’s gate with torches on each side
and inside red as a death hound’s oesophagus will we realise
the throat will never close and the howl wrenched from it is us?

*This poem is based on the Winter Hill fire and the mythic battle between Gwyn ap Nudd (Winter) and Gwythyr ap Greidol (Summer).