Hiraeth And Chewing Gum: Tropical Botanist Llewelyn Williams 1901-1980 Poem by Sally Evans

The clans are splintered
Evans Williams Griffiths Price
title bearers of half-dark past,
side by side, alike
yet individual as the trees

We crossed roads not to meet
sweet hidden goosegogs,
illicit pleasures of the boys
while our sisters learned sewing,
décor and decorum.

Ach y fi! In the docks
the lame, the beggars
grimy from engine coke,
Welsh speaking, Portuguese speaking.
Tea-clippers. Hiraeth.

Llewelyn went to Assam.
Already scholar, already
naturalist. Those goosegogs,
scratchy bilberries,
dirt-frilled daffodils.

Assam to Wales, Chicago to Wales,
Venezuela to Wales,
from Thailand to Chicago.
His life fills these 56 boxes,
76.2 linear feet of shelves.

A poet of the camera,
in pages of threescore years
he photographed lush plants,
jasmines, coffees, exotics
of doubtful spread.

He strode, sailed, flew
with greatcoat and briefcase,
trunks of equipment,
bold information-runner,
intelligence botanist,

committed recorder
at the zenith of industry
of leaves through a pinprick,
vistas in the plantations,
shuttered light.

These Welsh words are simples.
No names for tropical trees
in our hemmed-in language
Of the heart and hearth.
English the passport.

Botanical Latin
(which is often Turkish)
set over the poetry
of our lives, their secrets
arcane.

Oh she met him, she'd have loved
Chicago Taffs, the Venezuelans,
Patagonians, inroads in Thailand.
She'd have breathed in
the excitement of the tropics.

This love affair of the tree-juice,
latex, the warm sun-sap
that sets all elastic.
There's money and honour
in this kind of drug-running.

Chile, chile, gutter percha,
couma, jelutong
set against hallucinogens,
white wicked milk
of sleep-bearing poppies.

But Welsh is for poetry,
for tradition and goodness
from Dafydd ap Gwylim
to englyn, cynganedd
and the bawdy penillion.

Travel letters to Mary,
stay-at-home wife like a sister,
paper pulped from pine,
commercial tree products.
A life-work's demands.

Chewing gum. Long riding, hard
dancing, the youth cult.
Mucky and sweet, gum arabic
with spearmint, the sharp plant,
penetrating flower.

We cannot eat grass.
There is need for this substance,
grey in spittle, imported.
There is need for the scientist,
Welsh world patriot.

I believe this puzzled world
that begins in the valleys
and stretches out everyway.
The same at seventy-five
as at twenty-five.

Da Iawn, Pob Hwyl.
In Time's trapped classroom
Llewelyn of the chewing gum
still sips his Assam, as he
nods to his friends,

Welsh still on his tongue,
in his archive, his own forest
waiting, the trees named
in their order, surviving
careless and confident.