RESTLESS
This mountain sails through its weather
just as it moves through the centuries.
Magnanimous, it shelters all under its shadow.
Infinitely patient, it welcomes all,
Folding their tired dust into that long gaze.
The mountain, settled in its own weight
Breathes whispering streams and roots.
In the garden a robin sings in light rain.
The autumn winds curl the edges of leaves.
Dogs bark, uneasy from their white walled farms.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, Autumn, consciousness, landscape, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
THE TOWERS OF SUMMER
clouds roll
mixed with sunlight
slowly down
the side of Y Garn Dwad.
the hay is in now
so let it rain a warm rain.
now, now, everything green
reaches upward in one great exhale.
the towers of summer stretch out, bow down.
there is thunder
in the distance, so they say,
and the rivers will soon be filled again.
the surface of Llyn Berwyn though,
shall not be troubled for long:
it will return to its quiet reflection
of hills and cloud,
the brown trout
hardly noticing
a world
that cannot decide
between this and that.
held firm it is, unperturbed,
the lake that lies
in earth’s firm
folded hands.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged hills, landscape, light, Llyn Berwyn, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Poetry, rain, summer, Wales | Leave a Comment »
NINE RIPPLES ON THE LAKE
Will it take your names, all your histories,
your reasons for and against?
Will it hear them while it gazes,
timeless, at the timeless changing skies?
Unless you remain in the depths of it,
unless you lose the skin and bones you love,
unless you become welded, wedded to the flow
of remaining still, staying silent,
you cannot know anything of it
but what it is not.
What its eye beholds: an endless upward gaze
of shaping ancestral cloud.
It is an open mouth modelling syllables of ripples,
the sweet rain and beating grey hail.
This steady rest is your antithesis,
O comrades who dig and delve,
who shape and mark out and name
and lose, slash and burn and wonder why
loss is loss and always so painful.
Painful enough for songs that will not be forgotten,
the badge of emptiness and of dogged continuance.
Though you are beautiful in your ways,
you are not as beautiful as this.
Though you belong and hold on, tenacious, to that belonging,
you cannot belong as much as this mirror-edged bright shimmering.
Sit here and do not move. One century, two centuries,
a thousand years, the centuries before forests, before the lands drowned,
before ice, even, as the blackbird pecked the anvil to a nut,
as a stag became tree, and the oak watched as the salmon flicked
its rainbow waters.
The rivers locked and singing here in silver chains, in golden chains.
The lament you hear is your bloodrush, your heartbeat.
The sorrow you feel is your food and your sustenance in darkness.
Hatched and growing, you will swim and wriggle across the oceans,
the rivers beneath the sea ( its orchards, its plough boys,
Its bright jingling chariots, its proud, proud horses in the morning.)
Knowing nothing and knowing everything.
This is how water is, how the lake is.
A metaphor for everything else.
Shimmering mirror memory.
Look down into the highest heaven.
The moment it is reached for, it disappears
—
Posted in Uncategorized |
TUMBLES
The year tumbles fast now
towards its closing.
Dragon’s breath swathes the hill
In the middle of the morning,
and the grasses lie damp and lank all day.
The sun is distracted, its thoughts elsewhere.
The rivers race through the night with the rumbling stars.
Our moon flicks its light
from dim to sharp to dim.
Days of storm follow days of cold still calm.
Growth stutters and halts,
the trees reach for their golds and browns.
Plans compress or are abandoned.
What is not done, now can wait.
The fires are lit in dark mornings now.
The fires are all lit.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Autumn, Poetry, seasons, time, Wales | 7 Comments »
JOHN PRICE ‘BEULAH’
Between heaven and earth
John Price, there, was a blackbird before rain,
a song thrush in the evening.
He kept to small lanes
and taught others his delight
at the end of a hard day.
Carpenter, son of a carpenter,
between the rolling roads and rising views,
between Llangammarch and Beulah,
he measured with a clear eye
the mortice and tenon of his rhymes,
turning the tune, tapping home the notes.
His voice heard mellifluous
by the hills and rivers,
by the gathered singing poor,
by maid and shepherd,
by schoolchildren and labourers.
To sing in chains
is to watch the chains
dissolve.
—
John Price ‘Beulah’ was born in Llangammarch. He learned his music from a couple of skilled local music teachers, particularly the ‘sol fa’ systems of notating music. Apart from a couple of years in America, where quite a lot of his music was published, he spent his life as an estate carpenter, teaching music and local choirs around the Irfon valley in his spare time. He was a prolific and influential hymn writer in the early 20th century, and also wrote many popular songs. His work did much to promote local choirs, so central to the characher of Welsh rural life.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, choirs, hymns, John Price ‘Beulah’, landscape photography, music, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Poetry, Wales | Leave a Comment »
Larches
The way colours remain long into the grey autumn.
The way the hanging cones resemble syllables
Lingering on the tongue’s tip,
Or kanji haiku brushed carefully careless.
The way these larches let go and dance
On pale cooling hills.
The way images blur and smudge but remain themselves:
Brushstrokes of careless, magnified light.
An autumn aesthetic: nostalgic patterns floating.
Delicacy and decay: look close and the world
Disappears into light.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, Autumn, Cambrian Mountains, landscape, landscape photography, larches, Poetry, seasons, Wales | Leave a Comment »
GREEN ROCK
Green rock, black root
time is the river
that shapes this world.
–
Green rock, black root
sentience emerges
from realising relationship.
–
Green rock, black root
life is born from the seed
of sullen gods who found love.
–
Green rock, black root
this world, so full of sorrow,
this world, so full of bliss.
–
The familiar will fall away,
as leaves before the autumn wind,
as leaves before winter.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Haiku, Haiku-ish, landscape, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, photography, Poetry, time, Wales, water | Leave a Comment »
