WE RISE
We rise late
And tumble down
Towards it all:
A day suggested, infused,
Green and sunlit
Cloud and birdsong.
This late white
Bitter honey of May,
A mother’s scent,
A sparkled dew.
—
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
We rise
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged hawthorn, landscape, May, Poetry, summer on May 23, 2015| 13 Comments »
Strange a Delight
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ambience, art, landscape, photography, Poetry, rain, spring, Wales, weather on May 20, 2015| Leave a Comment »
A feathered crouch
Cool and slewed wind
Mountains hunch
Shuffle in and out
Tides of rain
A slow long tune.
A green nation
Rules the cuckoo’s voice
Stretched long the river rings
Vivid is the wood
Tousled the tall larch
Fathoms deep the bluebell haze
Grey and dappled
All sorrow weighed with joy
In tonsured cities
Days careful are numbered
Then forgot.
—
Owl-headed Dakini Dream
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, being, dakini, dream, expanse, mystery, Otherworld contact, Poetry, printmaking, spring, the numinous, vision, wisdom on May 15, 2015| Leave a Comment »
OWL-HEADED DAKINI DREAM
Owl-headed, lithe, folded,
Feathered.
Shock thundered voice:
Scythe words,
Harrow words,
Winnowed,
Fine-limbed spells.
Fingertipped, a weaving sined spin,
A cast out dance.
Sunlit surge in blue, fat sky.
A thousand green tongues
Hallowed.
Treasures rain,
Brushed light on lips.
Arched span a wing across.
Star chased, a trembled cascade.
Breathed dust, the burst
Before thought, bubbled,
Swirled, bowed.
Lean in, lean close.
A criss-crossed hum,
A bee jewelled drone
Truth stitched.
Skull bowl brain meal.
Glistening viscera
Steam slithered open.
All, all revealed.
My voice, a lute, a cuckoo.
A call distanced
By the fathoms of spring.
—
In this shouting world
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cold wind, despair, dreams lost, hollow voices, hope lost, lamentation, Poetry, wisdom on May 8, 2015| Leave a Comment »
IN THIS SHOUTING WORLD (Book of Voices)
There is no wisdom here
Or if there is
It is likely lost leaves caught spinning
In a roar of water tumult
Hardly caught sight of
There and gone
Swept down, swept down
To sink and settle
In oceanic darkness
The weight of it
Firing the engine:
The slow grind of tectonics,
Subsumed, subducted,
Ground down, incorporated,
Incorporate, a whisper lost,
Composted dust.
If there is light
It holds to the edges:
Irredeemable grey plateaux
Bitter the mica dust,
Bitter the cold distance.
If there are roads
They have been deserted
Too often followed
Lame, looted, lost
Abandoned the distinct
And destinations dismissed
Hollowed out, hungered.
If there were cause
All has been strangled thin
Worn out with wanting
With too much with not enough
With wasted words
Washed veinless worthless words
Given up, blown away,
Blown away.
If there were wisdom
It would sit down and weep.
Pwll y Bo ( continued)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Abergwesyn, atmosphere, emerging, individuality(iillusion of), landscape, landscape photography, Llanwrtyd, merging, naming, Poetry, Pwyll Bo, River Irfon, spiritus loci, time and space, Wales on May 1, 2015| 2 Comments »
PWLL Y BO (continued)
There are streams and there are pools,
Gradients of speed, time and temperature,
A swelling and a cascade of moments.
Phenomena to clothe attention,
Voids to place memories within.
The paths of scent and heartbeat
Wander through landscapes,
Unseen but persistent:
They mould the seasons of emotion,
The tides of joy and despair
We think we seem to own.
How came the spirit to Pwll y Bo?
Born was it from scoured stone,
Water tongues speaking water language?
Inchoate become cadent rhythm,
Song become meaning become message,
Whispers mirrored, hollows filled.
There before, or only after, the wept
And lost wondering?
There is a quicksilver veil,
A something shimmer that,
Once touched, ripples forever.
So restless a wanderer,
The dew of his holiness on every meadow,
Churches sprang up in Dewi’s footprints.
This dream so unlike that dream,
Remembered backwards, becoming familiar:
His prayers, her tears, wellsprings,
Mouths of howling and hymns, stones with mouths.
Just so and more
The glow of set suns on warm earth,
A day begun and gone,
A day to come through long night.
We become our own pool, haunted,
Becoming vague, portenteous,
Oracular as thunderstorms.
Flowered feet, rooted stillness,
A mouth full of blossom.
His feet, our feet,
Her tears, our tears.
Owls in the valley,
Blackbirds amid cloud mists.
As every river knows,
We are not what we seem to be,
Not so steady, not so constant.
A permiable impermanence,
A vessel unable to choose its content.
To taste, shape and let go,
A flow of song, a chorus,
Cascades of little moments,
But enough to shape mountains,
Enough to flood oceans,
A silver rippled pool dissolving time and space,
A breathing landscape generating names.
Pwll y Bo ( part 1)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Abergwesyn, art, awareness, folk lore, influence, landscape, Llanwrtyd, memory, Poetry, Pwyll Bo, saint, sentience, song lines, spirit, time, Wales, water on April 29, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Pwll y Bo, “Pool of the wraith”, is a wooded, rocky cascade of the River Irfon on the road up the Abergwesyn valley, a few miles from where I live. Downstream, stranded now in silence, but once the heart of Llanwrtyd, the old church site of St. David’s on a small spur of hillside around which the ascending road curls. Saint and spirit, a confluence of notions.
PWLL Y BO (1)
Mountain air threads mist in valley sleep.
We dreamless lie, cherishing weight.
Up at Pwyll Bo, I suppose, the lean, green larches
Will stand roaring down the dawn winds.
The oaks, staid grey and still on their slanted hill.
The otter shall sink and roll, melting to water.
Mossed rock wet, endless white the tumble.
Ever hollow spans the spirit’s song, a haunted bridge.
The winding path to delight is to be walked not run.
Time given to sliding slow eyes, side on side,
To stop and to forget.
This breath the church of all gods,
The heart’s Holy Ghost light woven.
Time enough for long blue days
And the dead slowly revolving
On the hillside church
Wriggling back to earth and seed.
Their heads now risen green, unfurled,
A dappled Trump each last and every day.
Unknown things travelling down
Are woven, whirled and worded.
Skein thin spirit clothed and given sight.
A voice, even, from rock and worried water.
Grasped and clothed its essence sings,
The illusory cling of names forgot,
The savoured winding sheet of waves
And pillowed, folded rocks.
It says, it says:
The confluence of all rivers is the ocean.
The confluence of all words is the heart.
Shall it cleave to the warmth of sunlight,
Wood avens and violets on the bank?
Or shall it bend into moonlight,
Emptying all in cool rest, the starlit air?
Or long longing, wait for drifting careless breath
Warm bodies dabbled, absent stares,
To speak heard and unheard,
Noticed yet unrecognised?
Clouds flower
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged attention, change, consciousness, earthquake, ephemera, landscape, nature, Nepal, night, Poetry, time on April 28, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Clouds flower in moonlight.
A wind rises, full of owls.
Cold that will wither the buds,
The sun will make right.
Far away, mountains have fallen.
What was, has crumbled.
We dream and dream and fall through time.
Each view infused, each moment passing.
This Sky ( part 2)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, awareness, book of voices, clarity, consciousness, inspiration, Poetry, printmaking, voices on April 16, 2015| 2 Comments »
Book of Voices ( This Sky: part 2)
Each cell voicing its own obituary,
Each mitochondrial Neanderthal fire-watching,
Knapped sound, flint words, held, tapped,
A feel for languid, mushroomed word
( so much glory hidden tangled beneath a milk stream
Of holiness, food, fingered, fluvial through substrate,
A healthy holy rot).
All with voice, all with dawning chorus of song.
An evacuation, a cacophany profane, blessed,
A golden urgent urination ( just so),
A mineral-rich, arcing satisfaction, an urge,
Urgent, unguent, a chrism (even), an eventide
And morning of the first day.
Smudged, succumbed, scumbled, it solidifies
And whispers itself out.
Such clarity cannot hold, a boiled ferment bakes dry,
Returns to sleep, mist rises in the valley,
Stars become acceptibly few, named, blink in and out.
The voices turn to their own dreams involuted,
A cochleal murmur suspended,
Slow revolving wrapped sleeping in spider-webbed tranquillity.
Sleep whilst you can, sleep in unity, in slow breathing
Revolved planetary orbits. Sleep pretty and woven.
Eyes lidded now, eyes lidded.
(Words, fragile as insects, scurry iridescent
Into darkness.)
—
This Sky ( part 1)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, awareness, book of voices, clarity, consciousness, dawn, dream stream, first day, icon, inner/outer voices, magical reality, night, patterns, Poetry, print, seven days, sky, stars on April 12, 2015| 2 Comments »
Book of Voices (This Sky: part 1)
Let us say: this sky, as pink certainly as warmed skin.
This, an indefinite and infinite blue, as those eyes.
And as close,and as distant, as God.
Let us say: there will be again,as ever,one voice that begins,
A clarion clear and moon-bright,
One stirring uttered echoing on the valley flank
Or deep on the sacred golden wood,
Cloutie-hung with shredded prayers,
(Shellac shined black ink careful lines on white silk,
Vehement, scratched curses on lead, tight folded,
Hidden in crack and crevice, utterance to vengeful ones
To do it, do it for me).
A shower of seasons tattered reasons,
Shattered, smattered, sculpted, howled to mothers
( hungry and cold in the dark, glint of light
And voice whispered behind the holy door).
Like this, almost exactly: one clear star
Glinted, marked out, a definite oneness,
A line, a shaft, a rope to upness and downness,
Dimensional isness, a road to stick to.
But as eye accustoms to deeper delved
And shrinking edge of silence:
One more there, and another, and so another
Until the sky is dark with inescapable stars
Vying for eye and patterning the mind with yes
And yes, a plan, a map, a purpose, a chorus
Of foamed ejaculate, a tide ripped and roaring in
Upturning pebble feather flotsam bone and tattered weed
( a flap of iodine, a wriggle).
Let us say, this close to madness
Is this close to revelation.
Night Rain
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, book of voices, creation, descent, language, night, Poetry, printmaking, rain, song, thought, word on April 11, 2015| Leave a Comment »
NIGHT RAIN (Book of Voices)
White noise, a rain of words
(All drops reflecting whole worlds),
But free from explanation, no discourse, no argument.
Indistinguishable millions falling through darkness
Only heard as they disintegrate, pool
And continue a life moving downwards.
A silent freefall ’til disillusioned by the solid,
Exulting, shattered, they shout.
Thought precedes language,
Orchestral is the soul.
A dance of demons and angels
Cross-dressing and interbreeding.
An heretical creation,
An unexpected evolution of many sorts,
Comes down as night rain.
Sound in darkness dancing.
