Wern My Fault

by Mike Jenkins

There wuz this fuckin ard gang
Led by this bloke Vlad
(Arfta some ol rooler).

Ee didn give a toss
'Bout trainers on wires,
Ee wan’ed more terrortree.

We wern gunna take no messin,
Ee knew t keep out -
We’d flash ower weapons.

No way ee’d risk it,
Noh even with is boyz
All tooled up an ready.

Fancied isself ee did,
Ewsed t ride orses bare-back,
Shirt off six pack.

Till one night they invaded
Ower Igh Street askin f trouble,
Shoutin theyer gobs off.

Joey goh stabbed, I cut
One of em ‘cross is face
T stop im attackin.

It wern my fault see,
I woz on’y defendin myself.
P’lice wouldn lissen.

Mike Jenkins issues a callout for a new Culture Matters anthology. Image above: Rising, by Gustavius Payne

On St. David’s Day, March 1st 2022, Culture Matters plans to launch a new anthology of radical Welsh poetry. It will be edited by Mike Jenkins, founder member of the Red Poets collective and an Associate Editor of Culture Matters. It will be widely distributed as an ebook and will also available as a printed book, if funding efforts are successful.

Submissions are invited, and here are some guidelines:

Guidelines 

1. You may submit one or two original poems in English or Welsh, each no more than 50 lines long.

2. Entries should broadly deal with themes relevant to working-class life, politics, communities and culture. A particular focus of the anthology will be ‘Rising’.

3. Entries should be sent to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by midnight on 31^st January 2022. No entries will be accepted after that date.

4. Please include the poem(s) and your name, address, and contact details in the body of the email.

5. All entries remain the copyright of the author but Culture Matters will have the right to publish them online, as an ebook and as a printed book.

Capitalism is working

by Mike Jenkins

We’re running out of petrol
On the road to oblivion.

Food or heat the choice
For many who are struggling.

The sea and the rivers
Have become our enemies.

Thatcher hacked identities
Many years ago.

Talk about North Korea
As TV fawns over monarchy.

We’re paying for vanity railway
As ours are cancelled, running late.

Homeless people beg on busy streets,
Cups empty as second homes;

Language and culture has no insurance policy,
Like a redundant person, alone.

Women who steal ripped from families
While Prince Andrew still goes free.

Supermarket shelves like the ol’ USSR,
But capitalism’s working, you see.

On April 13th there was a free online launch of new collections from three Red Poets, all from Cymru. it is available at.....

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/WenWgDy1StyKJpDKRYv6DQt0vgsuPwy1_8FDeXcBHyDN6Jnq8DKyRZbdoQMj8KPw.R22tn8uSVkXhXc2A  Passcode: wy$9vc!p

The three books are all recent publications from Culture Matters. They are Ballad of the Black Domain by Alun Rees, Our Father Eclipse by Rebecca Lowe and Anonymous Bosch by Mike Jenkins, with photos by Dave Lewis. The books are all available for sale in the Books section of the website.

The books are all inspired by the socialist republicanism of their authors, yet are still quite different. Alun Rees focuses on history (especially of the Valleys), Rebecca Lowe deals with issues of pacifism, spirituality and the environment, while Mike Jenkins looks at his home town of Merthyr Tydfil as a microcosm of working-class struggle.

She Died Alone

by Mike Jenkins

She died there in hospital,
no husband, Sissy, daughter Ingrid
no church kin around her
and at her funeral of regulation 10
her own Lusamba saw the coffin
and could not imagine her within.

She was a mother to everyone
who was blown into Victoria station
lost for food or direction,
took them home like injured creatures
fed them till they were strong
watched them fly, never to return.

The concourse deserted like Christmas Eve
only without the straggling drunkards
or last-minuters wandering homewards,
when a man cursed and spat hatred
announcing that he had Covid
(though he later tested negative).

She'd worked all hours overtime
to send money home to her mother;
they made her work without PPE
sickness made her vulnerable to disease.
She died alone, the banners remember
outside her station chants of – 'Justice for Belly Mujinga!'

Belly Mujinga was a ticket controller who worked at Victoria station, originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She died on April 5th of Covid-19. She was spat on by a man who claimed he had Covid, though later tested negative. She had been working without PPE. ‘Justice for Belly Mujinga’ was a vital part of recent BLM protests.

To A Different Country

by Mike Jenkins

We were selling tickets
for a journey to a different country
(our own, yet changed totally).
At the station our flags flapped
in a strange wind
stirring from valley to mountain
despite the frosty stillness
of another Monday morning.

‘But it’s the same old train!’
moaned the half-asleep
commuters heading for the city
as they took our leaflets
which explained the way.
‘They’ve only painted it up,
it still runs late
or over-crowded too often.’

The train followed the river down valley
and high up on the stonework
of an old viaduct plinth
someone had painted ‘Cofiwch Dryweryn’;
was it the ghost of Meic Stephens
suspended on dragon’s breath?

‘You will arrive on time.
We will build it together.
There is no guarantee,
no money back or return;
but watch it emerge
at the end of the line:
our hands, our imaginations.’

Notes                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    'Cofiwch Dryweryn' means 'Remember Tryweryn'. Over the past year in Wales many people have graffitied this: on walls , rocks, bridges and most recently on an old railway viaduct plinth in the Taff valley. It follows the vandalism of the original one on a rock near Aberystwyth, originally painted by poet and editor Meic Stephens in the 1960s referring to the drowning of a valley and clearance of the village of Capel Celyn, in the Tryweryn valley. See here

Mike Jenkins offers a prose-poem inspired by Martin Hayes’ book of poetry ‘The things our hands once stood for’ 

Those Hands

for Martin Hayes                                    

   I’ll never forget those hands resting on his lap like two sleeping cats till his body was wracked by a coughing fit and they woke and shook disturbed by dreams of slobbering, snarling jaws.

   Those hands knew deep down what I had acquired in studies, courses of rivers and streams black on his palms; while I had merely drawn a map of the Valleys with a shaded area to mean coalfield, like a tainted lung.

   Those hands – the pick ‘n’ shovel of them – had known the obdurate seams, blind tunnels and a dust so dense it seemed a swarm, a plague.

   As he talked they opened up and shone, glowed with his up-down tones which followed the streets down to the nearby park and Nye Bevan museum and back uphill sucking at precious breath.

   As he talked, they played like the kids he’d never had; cats scampering along fence-tops and clawing up bark.

   Such hands you’ll never see again, engrained with stories of his butties, of desperate rescues, of pit-ponies born into dark galleries.

   Those hands had been buried, were a print of carbon; had risen to rub the gentle flames of skin, to a hearth where he sat with his missis coaxing the fire to a high burning.