A kenfig journal title web size.jpg

a kenfig journal

by Kristian Evans

Kristian Evans is a poet, editor, and environmental activist. His books include “100 Poems to Save the Earth” (Seren), “Otherworlds: Essays and Letters on Nature and Magic” (Broken Sleep), and “Unleaving,” (HappenStance). He’s been obsessed with the dunes at Kenfig ever since he discovered them as a kid, running away from home and school, looking for a place to hide. He later lived on the edge of the dunes at Kenfig Farm for over 15 years. He’s the founding editor, with Zoe Brigley, of the online literary magazine ‘Modron’, which publishes work focused on the ecological crisis.

He can also be found on twitter and facebook.

 

Featured
Rain
Rain

Suddenly the rain catches us, swirling in on the squall between the dunes as the storm makes land, soaking us quickly.

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MIDWINTER AT SKER
MIDWINTER AT SKER

Ice on the rockpools and salt in the hail that lashed across the black shipwrecking hooks of Sker Point. I shrank into my coat, tugged my hood over my eyes and retreated.

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LAPWINGS AND TIGERMOTHS
LAPWINGS AND TIGERMOTHS

Here in the duneland, no rain for a month. Every day now, soon after dawn, the sun’s heat is hurried to a pitiless blaze and the sand burns the air to golden dust. Dragonflies thrive. They materialise beside us like digital updates from paradise, messages alerting us, alerting us –  then gone.

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The Laughter of Foxes
The Laughter of Foxes

I wake to the shrieking of foxes. At first, I can’t place the sound –  still half-asleep, it seems like a scrap of dream has escaped into the attic or the walls, whistling and itching and coughing – but I wake, and yes, it’s the foxes in the garden, back again as they have been the last few nights.

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Mugwort
Mugwort

I don’t know how she got here or where she came from but there she is, seven feet tall and standing in the potato patch and now I can’t imagine the garden without her.

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In the Rock Pool
In the Rock Pool

I’m staring into a rock pool, at Pink Bay, just outside Porthcawl. Called “pink” because some of the rocks, especially when wet, blush like wild roses.

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Winter Storms
Winter Storms

There’s a man in a hi-vis jacket the colour of lemon-rind with mother-of-pearl strips on the sleeves and he’s flapping his arms and shouting at the people gathered beside the sea-wall. They can’t hear him. The roaring wind and the waves pounding the breakwater are the only things anybody can hear.

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Rock Samphire
Rock Samphire

Halfway down

Hangs one that gathers samphire; dreadful trade!

These words, from Shakespeare’s play King Lear, are spoken by Edgar as he peers over the edge of the cliffs at Dover.

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Ghosts
Ghosts

Kenfig is plagued by ghosts.  Things have reached epidemic proportions. Ghosts in the fields, in the pubs, on the beach, in the houses, in the machines. Shrieking in the slacks, knocking on the windows, whispering in the walls.  Indeed, Kenfig could even be said to be haunted by the ghost of itself.

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Mushroom Hunting
Mushroom Hunting

First light. A sky the colour of a starling’s egg. As I lace my boots I notice a solitary gilded cloud in the north-east. It looks like an Elizabethan galleon.

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