Raw amnesia like mornings,
like pillows, your hair falling,
spilling into weeks.
Can you see the words
I leave for you? A trail
in light, likeness in the linseed,
vermilion in turpentine. I close
the windows. Watch my hands
pluck memory from carpet strands
I stand too close, I see too much
I ask to forget and then –
– morning again – clear
and wretched
and almost beyond thought.
© Nia Jane Griffiths 2024
Hello to all those of you that frequent this blog and read the words I leave behind. I am gearing up to something at the moment, which I hope will be published in the next year. Until then, I will be posting here and on my Substack.
All my love,
Nia
Comfort in the soft fur,
the leathered couch,
distractions before she
leaves you for the night.
Downstairs, drunk and
dozing, a home you’ve
made soft in all but
edges. A late day,
a weekend. You think
back to what you wrote
before. Bent knees. Hands.
Fingers. Lingering cries.
She hears you. Turns
another page. Reads words
you could have written
but didn’t.
© All rights reserved. Nia Griffiths 2022.
Skies stretch over nothing.
Truth barrelling down at you,
white light and brazen beyond
God – when was the last time?
Words and silence arrive to
splutter the guts of the matter over me.
It was not you, not duality,
not love, not secrets.
Time bends and, softly,
reveals.
Midnight did not bring
your first sighting, Puss,
nor give the Owl his wings.
You are the sum of every hidden
moment and only half its
part, now.
Words and silence bind you up,
sentenced to myth and past.
There is just you, not duality,
not love, not secrets.
A loss of time, now fraction
found.
© All rights reserved. Nia Griffiths 2020.
That grey-scale paperweight town still
lies heavy on my mind.
Thrust upon an ocean of gold
and cherry leaves, it stood silent
and unfinished;
an outline of houses made with
oil-black ink
waiting for the warmth of
paint.
Some will tell you
that if you head east
towards the sun-warmed hills,
the sketched out town will
stare you down;
row after row
of asymmetric triplets,
watching.
I remember looking in,
from afar.
Thinking that the people there
must echo the measured monochrome;
tiny paper beings of
ink, and soot.
Or, if they didn’t,
that it would be my task
to turn to ash.
I heard them in the park.
After dark, two glass eyed women
like forgotten trees, waiting.
Through the silence their
voices sang, floating the hills
and swimming the valleys of my youth;
winding the worn out path
to me. I stood there,
for a moment, almost alone.
Thrust back to her voice.
To all of their voices. Those
women of steel
of copper,
of quilted pillows and quiet revolution,
whose laughs could tear a mountain down,
whose lightning almost certainly had.
In just a drop
of their quilted voice,
I could see the charcoaled skyline rise
and fall before me like lifetimes;
melodic and chaotic.
I walked on. Past those
almost forgotten fragments
of home.
Nia Griffiths, 2017
© all rights reserved
In the sway of the blues
that followed,
I think I remember
a cry. Separate from the
melody and in memory
a beat
which danced amongst
the guitar strings.
And if I were to listen
closely,
intimately,
I think I might
hear the bars,
which surrounded it,
pause;
wait for some
small thing
that never quite
returns.
Nia Griffiths, 2017
© all rights reserved
N J Griffiths 