Posted in Uncategorized, tagged landscape.Wales, Poetry, St. David's Day, storm, trees, weather on March 1, 2015| Leave a Comment »
ST. DAVID’S DAY
This storm is born
In the crowns of the big trees.
See them, down in the valley fold,
Sway and surge in sea-echoed ecstasy.
The roar of threaded airs
Woven and slung out,
Spat with hail and sudden squall.
Dark their limbs,
And dark the thick air.
But bright the song of the chaffinch.
Bright the morning
And the baby’s cries on the cliff.
The sun shall lift the hills
And praise will rise.
Tonight, the owl’s amen shall resound
As round and cold
As the clear moon.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cloud, hills, landscape, mist, Poetry, Wales on February 27, 2015| 2 Comments »
CLOUD VALLEY
Cloud valley,
a cleft of mist
Where trees
breathe white
In smoke drifting
shadow.
A hidden,
silent place,
Its own winds
and weather.
Where long yesterdays
Drip
and linger,
A cushioned,
cultivated moss.
Above a winding
flight of kites,
Wheeling the way
the sun does.
And the shout of ravens,
Stern as castles.
The heart may watch for hours
The roll of dark and light,
The folds of far off land,
But it is in cloud valley
Where spirit longing loiters,
The shroud of matter,
A weightless dance,
Once more revolved,
Tasted.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancient poetry, art, cold, gnomic verse, habit, improvisations, landscape, letting go, memory, old age, Poetry, Wales, Welsh language, Winter on February 22, 2015| 1 Comment »
—
6
Ottid eiry, guin aren;
Segur yscuid ar iscuit hen;
Ryauar guint, reuhid dien.
This verse has a beautiful rhythm and some clearly visible rhymes. The last word on each line rhymes ( aren, hen, dien), bringing a clear finality to the clipped imagery. The second line emphasises internal ‘s’ sounds and a sonic and semantic similarity between ‘yscuid’ (shield) and ‘iscuit’ ( shoulder). The third line rolls with repeated ‘r’s. ( ryauar, reuhid).
A fairly literal translation is:
‘Falling snow, white hoar-frost;
An idle shield on an old man’s shoulder;
Very great wind, grass freezes.’
The second line may have been a well-known epithet regarding uselessness, appropriateness, wasted effort or similar. Whatever it is alluding to, there is a clear contrast and comparison between the external conditions of winter and the frailty or limitations of humans.
A shield on
An old man’s
Shoulder is a
Useless weight.
This battle lost:
Blood freezes,
Hair whitens.
A rattling breath,
Needle cold in
The lungs.
Cold wind scythes
The land, all falls
Cold and motionless.
A shroud of memory shields the real.
A heavy weight is its covering.
A welcome numbness dulls each sharp edge.
White is the weight of snow,
White the beard of frost.
White the hair, white the vision.
White the mountain shield above the mist.
Heavy and lame the old man’s hand.
Dead weight the shouldered shield.
Neither weapon nor defence,
No comfort, but an accretion of habit,
Laden down, a bitter burden.
A cloak, a blanket would better serve.
The only blanket is snow.
The only battle, against cold.
The one breath, a wild wind
Turning grass to steel.
A bitter blade of winter
On bitter blades of grass.
—
Posted in Uncategorized on February 20, 2015| 2 Comments »
ST. VALENTINE’S
Frost curls
the crisp,
cold shade.
In cwm,
on slope,
the snow remains.
But all the birds
of little Llangammarch
Sing and sing
in sun drift treetops.
They feel the slow
and sudden
Spring,
Dream the
geometry of nests
And the long,
warm skies
of summer.
—
Posted in Uncategorized on February 20, 2015| 4 Comments »
Our Poet Undone.
Here’s a line or two –
And take him all to your heart,
For he is drunk and foolish
And dying far too young.
Away from home but longing,
Measuring the golden cup of words
And singing it down
As if a drought were all
There was to come, and maybe
So in eternal rest –
A resurrection of blackbirds,
A mistle thrush.
A drunken
Return of jackdaws,
Singing home much too loud,
Down echoing streets
And clattered rooftops:
The missed opportunities,
The secreted passions,
The lean-to promised land,
Webbed and oil-stained,
Slowly rusted,
Smelling of apples
And wood shavings.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged day trip, February, Heart of Wales railway, journey, landscape, River Towey, Swansea, Wales on February 19, 2015| 2 Comments »
DOWN THE VALLEY AND BACK
The Towey practices its slow, bright curves.
From a distance watch indulgent, guiding hills.
Coaxed to soft mudded shore, the quilted morning
And a pearly sea, we are a downward drift, and aimless.
Caught up in salt breeze, its notions taught by brick cliffed roads,
The red deserted, bleak-eyed, stuttered cities,
Crouched and stripped of worth and hard work,
Neutered by bigger plans, a thrombosis of roadworks.
Unformed, uniformed, scrubbed up, led away
To an anaesthetised future, one size fits all, a shabby lie.
—
The world is bone and snowdrops
A sketched slope of towsled brown.
Fields pressed down and drowned in pools,
Mired and marred.
Scribed by hawk the white grey sky,
A scatter for crows.
—
The Towey dives back
To its deep, delved loins,
An upper silence reconstituted
And holy, disembodied,
Become mist and dew,
An older language,
Petalled lilt,
A catalogue of sighing valleys,
Wooded oak and ash,
Forgiving and lean,
Slowly choired and gathering voice.
Skywards ( the distant sunlit views),
Scrubbed of green, a whiter shade,
The rain-washed road.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged composition, creation, language, making, Poetry, words, writing on February 19, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Hesitancy on the road.
Many paths, choose one and run, or
choose none, still taking one,
’til it bursts to flow,
making itself, self-born,
isolated in shattering glory.
Language rivers, language
rattles, a trance of noise.
Teased by meaning (there or not).
A sequence,
simply a sequence of breaths,
dressed in rhythms of night and day.
Stripped back to the bone,
it is all only, ever was,
ever will be,
song (toes dangling
over the cool void, home of dear silence).
Emergence, enfoldment.
A certain expansion,
a sure rotation,
a welcoming collapse.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged evening, existence, loch, memory, Poetry, presence, remembering, shore on February 10, 2015| 2 Comments »
WHERE SHALL THESE GHOSTS
Where shall these
Ghosts, oblivious, remain?
Down by the shore
Counting dead-man’s-fingers,
Peeking in mermaid’s purses,
Teasing the mouths of anemones.
A ghost amongst ghosts,
Toes wet and dancing,
Sand-wriggled.
An audience of waves,
A laughter of gulls.
Enchanted
By hedgerow robins
And blackbirds after rain.
A cooling skein of late summer cloud.
Showered and drifting,
The pale washed sky.
Home, then, to warm silence,
A collected, amiable
Gathered-in darkness.
We are scattered, all,
Sown to seed the soil.
Strewn in time and place,
Nourished in small, bright things:
A voice, a scent, a feeling.
Reflected morning on a dew wet web,
As delicate as that, even.
Nothing to be proud of,
Nothing to disdain.
Held together by forgetting
And remembering, bursting
In and out of existence.
By the midgy lochside,
Mountains hidden,
A smudge of cloud.
The lap lap of waters,
The pooling dip of oars
On bright grey water,
The long islands rising
Anchored galleons of rock and green.
Crushed heather, rain wet grass,
The smell of woodsmoke and broth.
—-
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, dreams, early morning, fireside, Poetry, quiet, time, Winter on February 6, 2015| 2 Comments »
I am tired but cannot sleep
Or will not readmit the silent night.
I kneel before the kindled fire
Humbly warmed before its roar.
Its kiss and crackle a comfort
On the round silent dark day.
A skim of dreams caught and lost,
A habitual melancholic stare.
The cats are curled and silent,
Heads held thus, angled, ears ready.
They slip, too, bolsters between worlds,
Watching new ghosts stumbling
Unacquainted with their freedom.
Long held time caught fire
And vanishing up in smoke:
Each a metaphor for all.
A cup of words swilled and tasted,
A meal meagre but stilling echoes.
Eyes will close and close again:
The bright dream fields of morning.
And those I had forgotten,
Still waiting, one door swinging shut,
One door, opening out soundlessly.
—
Llym awel. Verse 5 improvisations.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged action, ancient Welsh verse, art, block print design, commentary, improvisations, landscape, peace, Poetry, snow, the world, Wales, war, Welsh language, Winter on February 11, 2015| 4 Comments »
LLYM AWEL verse 5 Improvisations.
Ottid eiry, guin y cnes;
Nid a kedwir oè neges;
Oer llinneu, eu llyu heb tes.
“Falls the snow, a white covering;
Warriors shun their tasks.
Cold are the lakes, their colour without warmth.”
Each line ends with a long hissing sibilance, the fall of snow, the melt as cold hits warm. The slightly longer last line elaborates the terse imagery and is a lack, draining motion and warmth from the reader’s mind.
The description of ‘warriors’ could be ironic. How strong and brave are they really, who refuse to go out in the snow? Or, in another view, the snow can vanquish even the bold warrior with its implacable purpose.
—
So falls and falls the snow.
White covers all, all senses white.
No colour for the sight,
No sound nor note to the ear,
All feeling numbed, no warmth here for heart.
The stalwart shrink, the warriors shirk,
The brave turn away, tasks undone.
Huddled small to the fire, faces inward.
For the lakes stretch vast and cold.
Their colour is death and grey pallor,
A wan weight the white drift sinks to.
Extirpated, extinguished, cold on cold.
Drained is the heat of war,
We are rendered aimless,
Lost to thoughtless staring peace.
We fall to not doing,
A sin for man whose fuse
Runs short and hot.
Severed, spun back, reeled in.
Conquered by an easy drift
And silent fall –
A world unbudged,
Resolute in is.
A cold refusal.
A cold covering.
—
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