Our Words and Away Day in Bleddfa
We held our first Words and Away Day on Saturday 12th July in the Sidney Nolan Trust’s Bleddfa Centre, where our Simone is also Artist In Residence. (Yay!)
After ice-breakers Simone quickly moved us onto some (brain) exercises to wake our individual creativities. In the morning we did some free writing, small stories and wrote our thoughts about some objects that had been left for us, including what can best be described as a relative of a slinky. We also had some portraits that GAWIE had commissioned and were asked to comment and critique them. (These are shown at the bottom of this post)
In the afternoon we went to the pretty church and learnt about it and Bleddfa and the meaning of the village’s name with a view to telling a tale later.
This particular stone intrigued me, reading only “In Memory of Mary Lewis”. Nothing more.
It moved me to write the poem below
In Memory of Mary Lewis
No dates, no family,
this memory in Bleddfa
Only your name exists
Remembered on this stone
behind the lichen of ages gone
that makes your stone a living green.
Were you good? Do you lie below
or is your stone a distant marker
of a life ceased over the hills
and far away from here?
Rest Well, Mary Lewis
Sleep in this cosy yard
I hope you had a good life
Before this stone was here.
And then we were done for the day, took a break, then went to the garden for the evening story round and finished in the late, warm night.
Those portraits mentioned above
