Mists of Time by Geraldus John Sift the swirling mists of time,
From time extant to time extinct.
There you may find time enough to see
What there has been,
Or what there has not been.
Listen to whispers echoing
From a long lost age,
Perchance to hear the sighs of St. Baruc,
Sad victim of the Severn, who gave name
Not to the dark docklands,
But to the holy place of pilgrimage,
The barren isle of Barri,
And the brief brook, Aber Barri.
Gaze deep into time’s mirrored silence,
To understand man’s dilemma
As waters, Taff and Ely, carried to coast
A blackness to stain fresh beaches. A
Silt destined to destroy the secretive Idyll
Of Barri, Tregatwg, and fair Dyfan.
And foretold that poverty would be replaced
By the antithetical companions of black gold,
The combined curse of filth, and riches.
Stay with me a while and consider
The consequence of a Celtic sequence,
For did not Giraldus Cambrensis,
Gerald of Wales, bear the family name de Barri.
Embedded in zones of lucid stillness,
The Barry, Cadoxton, Dyfan firmament
Bore anxious witness to gathering storms.
Songbirds, alone, disturbed rustic purity,
While from dark woodlands harsh harriers
Contended with raucous cries of seafowl.
It was a place of magic and mystery
Seduced by bedded banks of garlic flowers,
Where, drugged by lotus scented foxgloves,
Lazy elms gave shade to humming bees
That assailed the fragrance of wild flowers.
Low resting, it was a land of floods and farms
From which grew a lofty amphitheatre,
The bold, brash and beautiful town of Barry,
Steely sentinel and witness to a dark progression.
Metamorphosis by Geraldus John In search of hidden treasure,
Steely men of stone and coal
Ravished the innocence of hill and vale.
Catalyst to the eternal cycle
Of finding, extracting and transporting,
They awakened in odious halls
The twin beasts, Extraction and Death,
Beasts that slithered, as one,
To entwine fearless men
In the blackness of hidden hollows.
Men filled drams with coal, lungs with dust,
Tortured bodies with crippling wounds
And faced danger as a child would a game of chance.
Without malice they scratched green slopes,
And spat their double backed oysters into torn turf.
They wrenched riches from the earth
With the disregard of a back street abortionist
Snatching an embryo, bloody, from the womb.
Defiling their celibate land,
They set a demonic creed,
A malignant need,
To quench a hell bound hunger,
The insatiable hunger of manufacturing.
Behind men of steel and coal stood
Not the best loved men of industrial dawning.
Were these experts in wage manipulation
Early examples of unjust capitalism?
But within their ranks was one
With a foresight granted to few.
Born in Llandinam, Montgomeryshire,
He was to be Davies the Ocean,
A man of conviction and speculation.
Blest by the advent of a last ditch success
With men unpaid for weeks,
He found in upper Rhondda
A massive seam at Cwmparc,
A just reward for their loyalty and trust.
The final fruits of fortune’s wheel fell to Barry,
A township at the right place at the right time,
New railways, new docks, new stations.
The fusion of new peoples.
A new town, a new confidence,
An uncertain, but glittering future.
The new dawn of the beautiful, brazen Barry.
