Posted in Uncategorized, tagged landscape, meditation, offering, Poetry, prayer, Wales on June 2, 2019| Leave a Comment »
OFFERING OF THE MANDALA
Mountain breathes out.
I breathe in.
Still air.
Sky turning slowly blue.
A wood pigeon sings its call to prayer.
An offering of hawthorn blossom sprinkles the valley.
There is nothing that cannot be healed.
Nothing that cannot be lost and found.
–
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beaches, dhrupad, landscape, music verse, Pembrokeshire, Poetry, seaside, sunny days, sunny May, Tenby, Wales on May 23, 2019| 4 Comments »
DHRUPAD 22 (by the sea)
See see how it is how it is how the air is honey, honey now
and these clouds of milky love that drift so drift drift so slow sometimes,
so slow so so hard to see in which ways, where where do they go
they come they go so slow.
A sea too that breathes slow in sighs and sighing
coming going sighing shores. The waters turquoise,
turquoise sliding violet on violet with hardly a ripple, with hardly a wave.
At its edges the colour goes the colour goes to distant distant shine of light, the tiny far off cliffs of Gower, a radiant line of sand,
and birdsong from somewhere by here somewhere
in the cliffside blowsy bending bushes.
We are pulled down here funnelled down here
by a sighing wish for beauty, drifting down to the coasts drifting like sheep do in sunshine down down to the coasts.
And our eyes gathered up, turning and returning to this horizon this same singular steady horizon.
All the painters all the poets hunting beauty to become beauty to feel beauty, the weigh of it and know it.
A fly buzzes buzzes bounce bouncing off window glass, to get through to get through to get into that beyond that beyond to pass the invisible no,
to join the eternal, free and spacious world.
The cliffs here, like the hills of home move from bluff to smudge to etched deep etched edge with time and tide and sliding light,
though nothing can push this horizon from its certain line, nothing stop our eyes ever drifting over there.
Our own whisper thoughts slow slow then cease (almost), and music, even, except the breath of the wave of the wave the wave the wave on the folded bays out of sight below the cliffs here
bouncing green with sea kale and valerian, salt sweet and grasping each sandy earthed crevice there.
The poets, the painters, all the lovers all the lovers,
the long roads, even, longing for endings and sunshine and salt sweet salt tang, we all, all drift, drift down
funnelled by love funnelled by this beautiful distance
lying in sunlight signed by a moon in the drift drift blue slow blue sky roof the long slow day drift in the curved quiet bays
and the arc of sand and the nibbled shore
and the smiling houses all lined up
to see to see
to see
and be
within it
all.
—
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Dinbych yr Pysgod, landscape, photography, Poetry, seaside, sun, Tenby, tides, Wales, weekend break on May 21, 2019| 1 Comment »
—
Two nights by the sea
Matching our breathing to the slow waves.
Hardly a cloud to darken the waters
From this smiling turquoise.
A half moon nudges the tides
Wearing footsteps away, the miles of sand.
Thoughts drift to the one horizon,
But do not ever wander far.
We meander around the old town walls
And back and forth,
Like painters touching a near complete canvas,
Almost perfectly satisfied.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bliss, landscape, music, Poetry, Wales on May 18, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Slow river, sing them a song to sleep.
Breathed upon by love, talk to me in teentaal,
the dhoop of desire.
This world, this wind, all there is (for now)
blended through and through with bliss.
Honey-smooth and rumbling, I can hear the river,
where it has been, where it is going,
The long silver song of now.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged civilisation, deep ecology, existence, extinction, perspective, planet consciousness, Poetry on May 5, 2019| Leave a Comment »
LONG DREAM
This desolation is ours
Allowing no other song.
Our history of misery, threadbare and golden
Would not keep a family of mice
Alive on a winter’s evening.
Such honour we give poison
And the acid tongues that spit it out.
One by one we snip our roots
To free us from this sullen holy soil.
Cool mountain air and the rain
washes distance away.
It says:
You are not important enough to be hated.
Even a long dream will still be woken from.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art and skill, bardic stuff, certitude will doom us all, Culhwch and Olwen, deep mind, knowledge, language, Mabon, mystery, Poetry, storytelling, subject-object, the ineffable, Welsh literature on May 1, 2019| 4 Comments »
—
UPSTREAM
As the tides flow in and out,
the voices, withering and young, flow around.
We ride the oldest of things against the flow,
back up to a source where the stolen thing
is hidden unknown to any, unknown to all.
Forgotten forgotten, unnamed even,
taken before three days seen, even.
All these places are places and more than places,
more than time, more than ciphers, more than mystery.
Follow one thread of meaning and you will, for sure, tangle the cloth,
lose the weave, the weft and pattern.
To hold in your hand such a bright wriggling thing
and stop yourself from any grasping, from holding it steady,
from pressing the life and scintillation from it.
Mud and leaves it will turn to, where now it is dancing gold and laughing.
A pattern pressed into mud: perfect impression.
But breathe too hard, even, and it will smudge and dissolve.
That is how fine our truth is, how the names and places and tales wriggle.
Take one road but do not forget the others.
Take one small thread end and tease it out, like smoke, like water,
like the music of gnats.
Neither too big, nor too small, you must dissolve everything you are
and quietly wait, memorising the names and their genealogies.
How snow falls; how fire and promises are one;
how darkness carries its weight;
how the gods mould themselves and learn new dances;
make promises that will never break –
singing bones and feather dust in dark halls.
As soon as you are sure of something, let it go.
Do not hold on to what is not yours ( and nothing is yours).
To know what is, you must know what is not.
To know what it is not, you must know what it is.
Lose sight of this and you will fall down long centuries wondering why.
As soon as it was named, it became lost.
As soon as it became separate, it was no longer known.
Moon tides swing to the bright prison where the river bends,
the crooked one, the turning wheel, the water road.
Say the words, say the words, until the words grow wings and fly away.
The sound of their whistling pinions will diminish, diminish, diminish,
and now the wind will rise and bear you up into oceanic moonlight.
If you call me by my name, you do not know me.
If you call me by my name, how can I answer?
If you call me by my name, you have learned nothing.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ambience, consciousness, landscape, light, luminescence, Poetry, spring, the numinous, Wales on April 25, 2019| 1 Comment »
Harnessed in silence
It shall fold itself
Back into the morning.
Voiceless, comforted
Into the cool slow sunlight
And the mist by the singing river.
It shall be polished with ashes,
Burnished by breath.
And we can not help but die,
But that is not the problem.
Says the breeze in the pines,
The breeze in the chapel pines.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blackthorn, blossom, Cambrian Mountains, landscape, Poetry, sallow, spring, Wales on April 23, 2019| 2 Comments »
—
DHRUPAD 21 : blackthorn spring
There was a song one morning in front of, behind, deep down,
my eyes opening, open eyes and still dreaming,
dreaming words and rivers a song of a song of a Spring song
of a blackthorn Spring,
song of a blackthorn song a dream song slow and fast and glorious.
An opening song a Spring song, a blackthorn white froth cool wave
warm sun song
a sudden slow here it is song
snow in sunlight not melting but blooming warm snow song
settling in sunlight song song.
On black branches along the roads
a sprinkled silk fine tight bound waiting waiting
for bursting out when the air melts and colour, colour colour,
to remind us of winter gone to remind us of flowering to remind us of sweetness and bitterness to remind us of beauty within it all
beauty within us all, silence and beauty dressed in white and waiting.
A heaven full of spirits here and now,
in this bowl in this valley in this horizon.
Leave them be, these fields of dreaming, leave them be and laugh.
A fragile bursting foam aflood in the warm valley side
not in the hills yet not in the hills but here and there in the flash of sun
or how then now then it is not sun
not sun but sallow sallow
by the river valleys orbed golden and mist green and shining gold sallow
in seas of light dipped and tasted and diving down
to find the old beauty the ringing song.
Sallow willow sweet willow goat willow great sallow
dipped rooted down to water and bursting gold
peeled back and shooting gold in misted blues
the long miles of blue and haze and mild shadow furred and generous. Blackthorn and sallow
sun and snow sun and snow
a year song long
and remembering these notes
this tune
this dream
a year
song.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged april, blackthorn, landscape, Poetry, spring, time, Wales on April 19, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Light-hammered days.
Green burnished boughs.
Always this beginning
Scoured by cold winds.
Here and gone before we know it.
Birdsong too intricate to remember –
This woven life
With subtlest changes,
The dream repeats.
Though you might wish it,
There are no lessons to learn.
All the stories, a foam of blackthorn,
Blossoming suddenly everywhere.
Taste this now, it will soon be gone.
Gone to return, a somewhat different song,
Called out from another valley,
A little nearer, a little farther off.
–
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Haiku, Haiku-ish, landscape, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Poetry, spring, Wales on April 16, 2019| Leave a Comment »
SPRING SCATTER (haiku-ish)
Moon as bright as morning
burnished by a cold wind.
Mountain river white as clouds.
—
Floating mountain.
Two crows.
Spring sun melts frost.
—
Cold wind.
Bright sunlit air.
These blackthorn days:
Tumbled jewels.
—
Along the lanes,
blackthorn blossom.
On the high hills:
the bones of the snow.
—
