Tree spell ritual
The world breathes through me
and I am full of trees.
Silent teachers fill the silence;
Patterns dance at the surfaces of light.
Through doorways I dissolve
And am reborn with bones of truth.
Made whole and healed with cloaks of song.
Anchored, rooted, nurtured, sustained.
Harmlessly unfurled, patiently watching.
I am full of trees, dreamed by trees.
Ruthlessly harmless, sustained in emptiness.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bardic, consciousness, landscape photography, metaphysics, nature, Poetry, ritual, teachings, tree spirits | Leave a Comment »
The Doors of Midsummer
A breath of cloud moves east across Y Garn’s face.
Words are as scarce as swallows in a cold summer.
Anyway, anyway, they only grow from dream to tangled lie,
flowering like the bindweed covering all beneath,
Weighing down, weighing down until nothing else remains.
The doors have opened in every hill,
An invitation to join the dance and summer’s feast.
But we are taught to doubt generosity,
To look for the trap in openness and goodness
(nothing is true that comes so free and easy).
River and clouds are the rulers of this world
and they move on in their own time, unbidden.
Tune to a key that sings of endlessness, even though
no one here knows anything of that song.
For emotion is born from time and loss:
In timeless halls is no such thing.
No such thing but endless dance and bliss.
If the summer never ends
It will be a hard winter, here.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged belonging, landscape photography, language, midsummer, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, openness, Otherworld, Poetry, politics, time, transcendence, Wales | 3 Comments »
Green Clouds
Green clouds filter long light
Nodding grasses sway in flowering rainbows
The sky spreads out from edge to edge
The longest day lies blessed in sunshine.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged grasses, light, midsummer, Poetry, sunlight, Wales | 5 Comments »
FROM TRE TALIESIN TO YNYS LAS
1
We climbed the ladder road,
The wind road, peeling away distance,
Letting it drop curled below us
And the wide river mouth talking
Of nothing but the past it has known,
And the sands blowing snakes of words
Across the scoured wet flats
Where the land once was – a safe
And green world sloping down to sunlit seas,
Where now are tiny fishes and wriggling worms
And the hush of marram and the high wail of gulls.
2
That river has a poet’s mouth –
Meandering and easy, opening out to sunlit distance
The glory of horizons and a sweep of dangerous current.
I have sat on Taliesin’s grave
Gnawing his white knuckle bone
Between my teeth, tasting the marrow of bitter truth:
That there are no primary domestic bards here
But only the drone of tractors bailing sweet green hay
And thin clouds carded by wind over the bay towards Borth,
And a lazy river snaking between wavering weeds of slap-brown mud.
Swung between the rugged and the banal, lost on thin white roads.
These words, at best, are dry-stone, held together by habit
And a certain gravity that is the stubbornness of breath.
Look out, look down from here, from the throne, from the tomb,
From the seat of recognition ( the sword pulled out, the sword sheathed again).
We long for peace and call for peace,
Knock on the doors in the hills for our admittance
But have forgotten the password and cannot satisfy the gatekeeper
With our unconvincing boasts of embroidered skill.
It is not to do with pronunciation,
It is not to do with truth.
It is the quality of our hunger,
The rain-sated weight of bland inheritance,
The mouthed repetitions.
But let that go. Let the wind sweep it clear,
Let the estuary throat sweep away the salt bitterness.
The world is bright, regardless. It shines in the sun, regardless.
And the song remains, regardless.
Though no one hears it.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ancestors, bardic, landscape, landscape photography, Poetry, Taliesin | Leave a Comment »
The passage of time and the passage of light
And the drift of thought.
Cloud cover comes and goes,
A brightening and a darkening.
Birdsong and other rivers.
A convergence and a dissipation.
They all return to the one horizon,
Led away by song and by the rolling hills.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged horizon, landscape, light, Poetry, summer, Wales | 5 Comments »
FUJI (wisteria)
By the cottages of Penrhos,
Letting the warm wall take its weight.
Resting on the earth like a mountain does.
Leaning gnarled, an old man supports himself.
When time comes, his tongue flowers
Eloquent strings of song,
After the frosts have gone
And before the long rains.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged nature, photography, Poetry, summer, Wales, wisteria | 3 Comments »
ABERYSTWYTH RAIN
A long sweep of grey bay.
Above the town, an angel,
come for the living
or come for the dead.
It hovers matter of fact
above the dusty warehouses.
The castle keep grins
all broken teeth,
a bleak oppression,
our proud scars displayed.
Placid the waters today
and the tides all low.
The edge of one world,
the edge of another.
Hesitant, the angel hangs,
awaiting signs on the horizon
that something is worth moving for,
that something has not been abandoned,
something vital not forgotten.
—
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