SEEDS
The seeds of sorrow
and joy
Are always present.
.
Take a little time
To cultivate
The seeds
of joy.
–
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, awareness, consciousness, landscape, metaphysics, perception, Poetry, time, Wales | Leave a Comment »
ELECTRIC SILENCE
Memory is an electric silence.
Snowstorm at midnight
The tyre tracks we follow disappearing fast.
All the words, all the words,
Settle thickly obscuring what lies beneath.
If you do not know that moonlit void,
Without a body, without a thought,
Freedom shall elude you.
Racing on,
The road vanishing
Under the weight of white noise.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged consciousness, language, metaphysics, mind, Poetry, time | 2 Comments »
IN ABERGWESYN COMMONS
There the world shall open out,
Open out beyond the senses.
A wide valley shout with clouds,
A bonny plaid of river grasses,
A brow of grey tumbled crags
And the ravens and kites wheeling there.
The road rides the waves of miles,
Pushed upwards, lean and full of longing.
Free of voices, free from thought,
As if it were a better world
Unsullied, shaped by simple life
And simple death.
Praised by its mist of rain.
Blessed in its silence.
I have told you the road.
And you found it so.
Open-hearted, washed, released
In Abergwesyn.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, Cambrian Mountains, hills, landscape, Mid Wales, nature, Poetry, transcendence, Wales | Leave a Comment »
SNOWON THE MOUNTAIN
Snow on the mountain.
When will fools be silent?
When will the wise speak out?
.
Snow on the mountain.
Raucous sparrows
Wake a fragile sun.
.
Snow on the mountain.
An empty train crosses the valley,
Keeping its promises.
.
Snow on the mountain.
Cold wind knocks on every door
Seeking shelter.
.
Snow on the mountain.
Murmuring flocks
Sheltering the newborn.
.
Snow on the mountain.
The broken tree
Still with new shoots.
.
Snow on the mountain.
The coal-house latch
Burns cold.
.
Snow on the mountain.
It is always the clever ones
That save us, then destroy us.
.
Snow on the mountain.
Blackthorn in the valley.
War is never far enough away.
.
This piece consciously echoes an Early Medieval Welsh poem that begins each stanza with the same line. It also has a flavour of a haiku sequence. It was written in early Spring this year.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, Haiku-ish, landscape, metaphysics, Poetry, spring, Wales, weather | Leave a Comment »
WILD HUNT
I am lost
So I am yours, Gwyn.
Driven mad, worn thin,
By the fickle certainties of man,
The lies of the blood
In the lees of trust.
To slip and wriggle
Into cracks and crevices,
To numb as many seconds
As we may.
Kneel down in the soil
And weep.
You are clay that knows death
And have learnt a mechanical time
So as to watch its coming.
The whispered “This is how it is”.
That is a lie weighed down
By the phantasms of others’ dreams,
Souls worn wan draped in dust.
If we are not reborn
Then where does this yearning come from?
If we are not reborn
Why does music bring so many tears?
If we are not reborn
Whence the joy, whence the sorrow?
If we are not reborn
How do our desires arise?
Whence our dissatisfactions?
If we are not reborn
What purpose does hiraeth serve?
What purpose the stirring of the blood?
The bones of trees
I turn to small hopes.
Collect your souls, Gwyn.
Scatter them into a new Spring.
–
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ancestors, art, bardic, consciousness, Gwyn ap Nudd, landscape, mortality, myth, Poetry, rebirth, souls, transformation, Wales | Leave a Comment »
The minutes crack open and bleed cold.
Breath is chapped and hesitant in semi-quavers, a minor key.
The hawk is ice that hunts unrepentant the mountain heights.
Slay complacent warmth, the fickle needs of small hearts.
The flutter of joy, cackle of crow.
A silent field: whiteness extends to the very mists of deep mind.
Carved walls at the edges of space, words written there:
We are extinguished and free.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, cold, consciousness, landscape, landscape photography, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Poetry, seasons, time, Wales, Winter | Leave a Comment »
RIVER WORDS
They do not say
What they sing
For your listening
But for their own joy.
No will of their own
But to find the deepest
And return.
Where streams meet:
A birth of spirals.
By the bridge
The patterns hold steady.
Acquiescence to the way.
We think we know them
By their names we know them.
We know them by their names.
You name the river
‘Destroyer of the children of men’.
I name this river
‘Gentle mother of fields’
The river calls itself:
‘Longing for stillness
In the deep’.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged consciousness, landscape, language, nature, perspective, Poetry, rivers, Wales | Leave a Comment »
BHAIRAV (THE WEIGHTLESS WEIGHT OF AIR)
Air.
Flowing river from mountains cooled,
And the passion of stars
Piercing the bow of Time.
Air.
Layering droop and singing yet
On the long slope of dawn.
Air.
Tinted blue yet.
Twisted warm and wan.
Twisted slow, rolling.
Air.
Dreaming pulses
As reasons’ reflection
But vague yet.
Vague and languid,
At edges stalled.
Moistened in sleep,
But not.
But not.
Air.
Piled deep
Down to the stars.
Life sways hanging, drifting.
Trees with their hair
Loose and swaying
Singing, singing,
Down to the starlit voids
Hanging the tidal edges
The endless full innocent darkness.
Air.
The trees shape
Single syllables
Howled whisps of vowels
Finding froth from feeling.
Air
Patterned, pressured, punctured
Parcelled.
Air
Twisted and released,
Spread out and stretching,
Tidal current
The vapours caress
Their gradient glacial moments.
Air
Sun bright now
Shifting shimmering.
It suffers all thought.
Turning about
Returning it to silence.
Air.
Sun-bright now,
Spirit-filled
Song-filled
The tongue of gods
Hungry for this and that.
It will not
It will not.
It will
It will.
Invisible lover of every surface.
Air.
It stretches, it pulses.
Gods are born from air.
They flow in and out,
Grow fists of nothing.
They flow in and out.
Gods born from
The turbulent throbs of air.
Movement shiver shafts.
Silence
Silence.
–
Bhairav is a well-known Indian raag of the early morning. I have only recently grown to love it and its variations. Perhaps the tense sharps and flats put me off. It has the energy of cool space, of heights, of growing light, of distance, of precise wing-tips, of soaring wings, of the dip and soar of red kites. This is a sort of verbal alap – a slow exploration of the moods and directions of morning air, here in the mountains.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged air, dhrupad, dream stream, floating hawks, morning, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, Poetry, space, the numinous, transcendence, vision, Wales | Leave a Comment »
THE ROSES
The roses
They have been in bud
For months
Through sun and rain.
Now they open,
Bloom for a day or two
Giving joy to all,
Then fade and
Fall apart.
The roses.
The roses.
They throw off their beauty
Like dancers.
They value more
Their roots
And their thorns.
The blood red hips,
The hard won strength
To go on.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, change, consciousness, landscape photography, metaphysics, nature, Poetry, roses, time, transformation, Wales | 2 Comments »
simonhlilly 