D.A. Prince: How I Wrote ‘3.00 a.m.’

I hoped that if the reader could feel what that walk was physically like, they would bring their own memories into the poem

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3.00 a.m.

The Welsh legislation specifically states that ‘No person living outside Wales
may enter or remain in Wales without a reasonable excuse’ ....
—Manchester Evening News, 6 November 2020.


The radio fills with closed roads, police checks 
at the border and orders to stay local. 
At 3.00 a.m.—and every hour of restless questions— 
the only route is through recall, 
remembering the best of how it was. 
                         Tonight, that cliff path. Not the climb, 
not up the loose slate, shale and polished rock,
the only hand-grab a blood-red snatch 
of rotting wire, not the rasping breath 
of gradient and watching every step. 
None of that. 
                         Tonight will be 
the high and breezy cliff-top, 
grass rubbed down to nearly-nothing in the wind, 
open to all-round view—from grey roofs, sprawl 
of town and factories, and then inland 
to lonely farms and dots of working lives, 
to north and south and overlap of hills 
holding this coast. And the enormous sea 
alive with hectic light, the waves whipped up 
to spit and spray, their arguments with cliffs 
lost in the rattling air. 
                         Tonight will be 
the far-side path, downward, one-walker-wide, 
channelled by rain’s familiarity, 
between the dizzying drop (our left) and (right) 
a bank with bracken, bramble, violets, 
topped with wool-snaggled wire 
and urgent bleating lambs; with crows, with gulls, 
with salt breathed in at every sunlit stile. 
Down, past the tangled pines, the broken relics 
of winter storms, old branches heaped, unreachable; 
down, towards the scoop of beach, rock-pools, 
a baby river trickling through the sand; 
down to its creaking bridge, the flat of roads 
and caravans’ exotic names and crazy golf 
and carpark grids. 
                         Tonight—again, again— 
re-winding the loose-limbed insouciance 
we took for granted once, how much.

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This poem has been reproduced as best as possible on the website, but the formatting may have changed outside of our control. You can see the original poem here:

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The epigraph suggests this was written during lockdown. Is that correct?

Yes, as a way of surviving the instruction to ‘stay local’. Remember when we were told to go no further than 5 or so miles from home? This poem was both a way of using sleepless nights to re-create something restorative and of holding on to a memory of one significant place. 

It was also a reaction to knowing, from TV and radio, that I couldn’t cross the border into Wales, back to that deeply-rooted place my parents came from. The border was manned by police, something totally new and disturbing, and with no timescale. I was cut off not only from the places but from my past; that’s why I searched for ways to hold on to it. Poetry was the most accessible way to do this, to fit myself into the visual detail of memory.

You live in England, but were born to Welsh-speaking parents. Do your Welsh connections influence your writing?

I’m not sure that ‘influence’ is the right word here; it’s more complicated. Welsh was my parents’ first language, but they brought me and my younger sister up in English. We lived in North-West Leicestershire and I can’t recall any other Welsh speakers in the area, or anyone using a language other than English. Our childhood holidays were always in Wales, usually in Aberystwyth, and I was used to being surrounded by the Welsh language. It was a comforting sound that flowed around me, spoken above my head by grown-ups, by family members and friends delighted to be reunited. 

While I was comfortable within this linguistic divide, it also made me, inevitably, an outsider. Many of my family were first-language Welsh and I got used to its rhythm and cadence, along with some elementary level of understanding. 

Why did you not specify at any point precisely where the poem is referring to? Where, just for the record, is it – and why is that location important to you?

If I’d given the location there’d be a risk that readers would see it simply as a poem ‘about’ that particular place, somewhere you might google, nothing more. I had in mind Roger Robinson’s poem A portable paradise, in which his grandmother advises him to hang on tight to the memory of a place, his own private place, for when ‘life puts you under pressure’. It’s something to help you survive, to stay strong. I hoped that this walk, one I knew well, would find an answering experience in each reader: that each one would recall their own walk, and relive it in metaphorical step with mine. 

Constitution Hill, in Aberystwyth, rises at the north end of the promenade, closing off the bay. It has a cliff railway – much-loved by children and a bonus for those who don’t want to zigzag up the steep and sometimes slippery path to the summit. That path has slowly been improved – you no longer have to hang on to barbed wire on the steepest stretch – but it’s still hard work. The views from the summit are wonderful, though, and worth every aching muscle. And the path goes on, part of the Ceredigion Coast Path, down to Clarach’s sandy beach and caravans. If you are energetic enough, you can go on, to Wallog, then Borth.

We go to Aberystwyth once a year, generally in March, and if the weather’s good we aim to do as much of this walk as possible. I was delighted to walk it again in 2022 (glorious sun!) and to see that the path down to Clarach has had its surface levelled. It used to be gouged and twisted like a dry watercourse. Now I can look around more instead of watching where I put my feet.

You really made me feel, as a reader, that I was doing that walk – how did you set out to achieve that in terms of the formal qualities of the poem?

I hoped that if the reader could feel what that walk was physically like – how the muscle-memory felt, how the ground changed underfoot, how the air changed as we climbed, how much in lockdown we were missing – they would bring their own memories into the poem. Yet the climb is recreated by dismissing all this, by describing what I’m not going to write about, so that the views from the summit stand out – as does the sense of achievement – before the gentler, spring-flowered walk down into Clarach bay. Repetition – ‘Tonight will be …’ – gives an insistence; it’s another way of saying ‘you will remember, you will’ so that I (and the reader) hold tight to this place, this time, even though it’s only recalled, not immediately experienced.

I can never look out to sea from that height – looking down on sea birds – without remembering Louis MacNeice’s lines (from Epilogue, written in 1936):

And the gulls who weave a free
Quilt of rhythm on the sea.

Louis MacNeice Epilogue

MacNeice, back in London after his trip to Iceland with W.H.Auden, also was remembering; he was writing in the run-up to WWII. In his poem about the increasingly bleak world picture, filled with threat and menace, this image stands out, along with the floating lightness of his words. 

Ending the poem posed its own challenge: I had to find a way back into the real night-time, stuck in the Midlands, still in the height of the pandemic. So, hence a note of regret for what we’d taken for granted, not just that wonderful place but also the freedom to travel easily across the border into Wales. 

I’m grateful we can now travel again, but I can’t forget what it felt like, back then. I hope I’ve learned from it not to take anything for granted.

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D.A. Prince’s third full collection The Bigger Picture, published in 2022, is from HappenStance Press. Her first, Nearly the Happy Hour, was published in 2008; her second, Common Ground, won the East Midlands Book Award in 2015. She has worked in librarianship, teaching, educational administration and adult education, and her poetry and reviews have been published in a range of literary magazines.