This sudden moment slows.
Wingbeats in the mist.
One drop of rain, then another.
—
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
One drop (haiku)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Haiku, Haiku-ish, landscape, Poetry, summer rain, Wales on September 17, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Leaving Llangammarch
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, death, landscape, landscape photography, Mid Wales, mortality, peace, Poetry, the dead, Wales on September 15, 2019| Leave a Comment »
LEAVING LLANGAMMARCH
Who would choose to leave this Llangammarch
Wrapped in birdsong on a warm and sunny morning?
Who would lift their eyes from the glistening waters
Draped with alder shade and grasses?
Throughout the houses it has now the soft hush of loss.
The hollowness of a hollowed name, a rehearsal of memories.
Llangammarch threaded between wood and waters;
An easy confluence neat folded against the green grey heights
of Epynt and its sighing skies, its distances tasting of blue.
Except those who tend the dead ( the small things singing), no one lives on Epynt now.
It is a roofless, empty house, shadowless, and singing winds.
Perhaps it is there our departed go, congregating to watch the unfolding world,
At ease and in peace, soothed by a longer perspective on sorrow and joy.
Who would leave Llangammarch, warm and dreaming?
Those with dreams urgent and golden;
Following the light upstream,
the open skies, the warm winds,
the curlew berating heaven.
A floating world, a breath away.
One breath away.
—
Shining World
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, bardic stuff, coexistence, landscape, Mannanan, metaphysical cosmology, Otherworld, paradox, Poetry, symbiosis, Welsh myth on September 4, 2019| 5 Comments »
SHINING WORLD
(MANANNAN’S ISLE)
Glass-smooth the sea,
Its light a silk knife
Whispering sighed names:
The hidden islands.
Bathed in rainbow words,
There and not there,
Not to be focused upon.
To be rolled upon the tongue,
Tasted and weighed,
Melted to a honey meaning.
Sung in fickle keys
Near impossible to memorise.
A world away, here between breaths.
Suffers none to name it
Nor clothe it in anything
Other than it is.
Unknown by knowing,
Reached by rudderless boat
Through mist to sunlit sands.
Their mouths say one thing,
Their eyes another,
Their hands dance around,
Gestures in hypnotic weave.
Hope is not there,
Nor is it elsewhere.
Those who want shall
Never be satisfied.
To remember perfectly
And to forget perfectly,
And to continue, nonetheless.
That is how to belong there.
From the lands of eternal dreaming
We seem here to vanish continually,
Swept away,
The tides of joy and pain,
Doomed and mortal.
But without time
What can be done?
The perfected go nowhere,
Nothing accomplished.
Sun and moon and stars hold still,
All roads vanish in the mists.
Wordless songs.
We dream of them,
They dream us,
The in and out of breath.
A golden chain,
Link needing link.
We must dance together.
—
Bioluminescence
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, consciousness, cosmology, deep ecology, dream, godlike things, landcape photography, Poetry, the numinous on August 29, 2019| 6 Comments »
BIOLUMINESCENCE
1
Whether you are mortal or immortal
Just depends on how much
Of your mind you inhabit.
2
Even the gods are constrained by their natures
And the expectations of their worshippers.
Obliged to inhabit forms thrust upon them,
Wearing bodies too tight, too clichéd.
3
The ancestor who lived in a hut on the mountain
Has become the mountain.
The mountain walks out in the morning mists
Along paths of nodding yarrow, cream and pink and golden.
4
His blood has become rivers, his thoughts the vast slow winds,
His desires the vague hopeful hungers and fears
Of small things he hardly sees, so fleeting they have become.
5
Bioluminescence: we travel out on rays of light,
Swaying forests dripping guttering stars.
The pools there, and their reflection,
We take as real to us, a similar mirror-smooth view.
6
Encysted on distant moons desiccated
The dead deities await a new rain of praise
To swell and sprout new thoughts in old minds.
7
There is a storm in the mountains and a fire on the sea.
We shall not escape the certain stirrings in the cauldron of chance.
The food of gods and the home of gods,
We shall succumb to the very smallest of them –
The ones we created, the ones created for us,
The ones that created us.
8
Their burning footprints will come this way,
Their burning eyes, their flashing tongues,
Their numinous promises.
9
The huge creatures of the past, where are they now?
They lumber in the vocabulary of our cells,
Eloquent and vast in warmer, salty oceans with a brighter sun
And a flash of coloured feathers.
10
We will be gone soon
Leaving strange food for new gods.
Ones that will finally be freed from our dreams
And breathing the air of vast open space
Iridescent with stars.
—
Tree Spell Ritual
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bardic, consciousness, landscape photography, metaphysics, nature, Poetry, ritual, teachings, tree spirits on August 17, 2019| Leave a Comment »
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.
—
The Doors of Midsummer
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, landscape photography, language, midsummer, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, openness, Otherworld, Poetry, politics, time, transcendence, Wales on August 13, 2019| 3 Comments »
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.
—
Green Light (Longest Day)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grasses, light, midsummer, Poetry, sunlight, Wales on August 9, 2019| 5 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.
—
From Tre Taliesin to Ynys Las
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, bardic, landscape, landscape photography, Poetry, Taliesin on August 6, 2019| 2 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.
—
Led away
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged horizon, landscape, light, Poetry, summer, Wales on July 24, 2019| 5 Comments »
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.
—
Fuji
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged nature, photography, Poetry, summer, Wales, wisteria on July 5, 2019| 3 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.
—
simonhlilly 