News Archive

Landmark Birthdays

The Wales Millennium Centre was brought alive with a whole weekend of free and participatory events to celebrate its fifth birthday on 14 & 15 November.  The Senedd also opened its doors with events to mark its the tenth annisversary of establishing the National Assembly for Wales.

The National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke, contributed to events in both buidlings and read specially commissioned poems to mark the occasion.  Read these two poems below.

Ceri Wyn Jones also read a celebratory poem at an event in the Senedd.  Click here to read the poem on the Welsh pages of this website.

Ode to Winter
(After Beethoven's Ode to Joy)

Exultation! Salutation
to the shrinking hours of day,
to the light lost by the minute
sing, and sing the dark away.

Now we’ve survived the summer dying,
the autumn funerals, let us praise darkness.
As animals in winter hunkering down
in burrow, cave, cwtch, den, earth, holt, hut, lair,
we hoard and make a nest and call it home.

The low sun sets too soon, a moment of gold
then it’s gone. Dusk erases trees,
hard lines, horizons, spills into the room,
dissolving words on the page, till all is grey
but the last flame of geranium in the gloom.

In the shortening day, bring in the last flowers
to crisp in a jar, beech buds to break into leaf,
a branch of larch. Take winter by the throat.
Feed the common birds, the tits and finches,
the spotted woodpecker in his opera coat.

In every living thing, the clock is ticking.
In the oak-wood, under the mulchy earth,
a million, million bluebell bulbs lie low
ready to flare in the lengthening light of spring,
after the dark, the frozen earth, the snow.

Let’s learn to love the icy winter moon,
or the moonless dark, the winter constellations;
Jupiter’s glow like a slow, incoming plane;
neighbourly windows; someone’s flickering screen;
our own drawn curtains and a lamp-lit page.

Let us praise good company, conversation,
music, silence, books, the wind and rain,
the beautiful bones of trees, the taste of air,
darkening fields, brash glitter of the city,
that winter longing, hiraeth, something like prayer.

In the fields, fox and buzzard, crow and kite
are clearing the dead, clearing the way for the myth.
On the darkest day you’ll bring in the tree,
cool and pungent as forest. Turn up the music,
pour us a glass and dress the house with pagan finery.

In the theatre of winter,
in the drama of the dark -
Exultation, salutation!
Sing, and sing away the dark.

Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales
First performed on Sunday 15 November 2009 preceding the Welsh National Opera's performance of Ode to Joy: Beethoven Nine.

Small Blue Butterfly

Six years old, with my father, waving to sailors
in the heat of a long ago summer, leaping the rails
as a big ship docked, steadied and slowly rose
on the rolling tide when the sea-gates closed.

Dizzy with tar, salt, coal, the river
lost in the throat of the Severn, and just here, a quiver
above the muscular mud, the colour of sky
over the Bay, a small blue butterfly.

I think of its frail flight over shifting silts
as I climb the steps, slate firm underfoot,
like climbing the centuries, leaving the lift and lilt
of opposing currents a long way out.

After eight hundred years adrift,
and all the years of my life on the way to this,
I claim this house as my own,
climbing the steps, coming home.

Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales
Commissioned poem to celebrate the National Assembly's tenth brithday, first performed in the Senedd on Saturday 14 November 2009.