Nigel Jenkins is a poet, journalist, editor and travel writer currently working on the great National Encyclopaedia of Wales project. His books include Acts of Union, Ambush and Wales, the Lie of the Land. Blossom Time It comes round again, and who in the whole of this half-done world isn't wet between the mind's legs with the woods-mulched garlic, bum-fluff greens and these undomesticating bombs of sunflesh, here today, gone with the clichés of the haiku boys? Cherry white, cherry pink, the snow winds' ambush, every April of my life you've sung me into May, and every April I've ached for the time and chutzpah to sift among the blown petals of speech for the phonemes to shape you a bowl of praise. But always I've been busy, always too fussed with defrosting the fridge, or the comet-of-a-lifetime ... And they're gone, the blossoms, gone in a night, before the ice in my fridge has turned to slush ... And ah well, I've said, there's always again, and when the weather's right I'll iamble a bit, and sit on a stone and take purposeful note ... The late snows are melting on Carreg y Fan, and again is here: blossoms out, shirts off, the first legs of the year driving both shirted and shirtless wild ... and - what's this? - the alleged poet is busier than a busted bee exercising the goldfish? This April the blossoms have been saying to me: "What kind, gwboi, what kind of a presumptuous, nervy bastard are you that you dare to dream you'll be present here in a year's turning - for yet again your pen to ignore us? Live the now, boy blossom, and finish your sentence." And they unbury for the baby a morning perhaps or an afternoon when I gazed from my pram on a quilted great arc of flouncy sky - the pink of it, the blue, the necessary crow. But nothing done, for the forty-seventh time. And all I dare say, as the storm-troops drive the last of the lost into the sea, is "Same time next year?" Some Lines to Request Poteen Praise, Terry, your ace poteen and praise be that Neath's heddlu are averse, no doubt, to verse - we want no drug squad readers. These dry lines, cynghanedd free, are sent to say I'm thirsty for more of that cosmic juice (spiritless bards are no use) which, by the time I've finished this, will have passed to the fish of Swansea Bay, the bottle ready to ferry this scrawl across to Melincryddan's spirit-maker number one. Ice on fire, you're the poet of where the contentions meet, your wisdom's mirth an oak whorled from the killing fields' antiworld and your pained hands' outlaw love for loves the world's afraid of. It's late and getting later, I'm a poet needs the fire that only you can distill: a Mumbler craves a refill. Sláinte, then, and iechyd da to Wales that voiced you, Eire whose fatherly hand led you, star by stream, to rebel muse and old alchemical ways with water, fire, fruit, barley. Essence of unmachined rain, most magical of moonshines, clearer than ice and iced air, though of suns the container; exploder in the nostrils of red orchards, dusty fields; semen of the gods, hot blood of goddesses, all falsehoods' undressing when love defers to the teachers and preachers; song sprung from its silences - bass of choirs, sky of pipes - to set all atoms dancing, the whole galaxy a-swing. Each sip - and no 'head', thank god - a fleadh cum wild eisteddfod. The tide's in, the spirit's out: be, Terry, on the look-out for landfall on your doorstep of this craft poteen-bereft, barnacled and seaweed-draped as proof of long, hard voyage, weighed with verse and a bard's curse on all hooch-busting peelers: may every glass their thirsts crave turn to boiling aftershave. Here's a hope this plea finds you stocked enough with cosmic brew to save me from my drouth's hell by filling full this vessel. Hurl it then towards the stars and I'll run from my boudoir to catch it on re-entry, Melin's gift to Mumbling me. So pour, Ter, the nectar in that's sure to set me writing (light, awen, on this windbag!) full cynghanedd - yn Gymraeg. First and last I'll drink to you, friend, bard and oaken guru. Your spirit spells revival: may your still be never still.