MARCH MORNING
Floating on time
The seconds bear us up
Slow spinning in light
Searching a language to say it
Though nothing can
Break the elastic bonds
Of being and non-being.
Punctuated, memories
Stack up for later.
Folded back on itself,
A dough that rises and expands,
Universal breakfast
Come morning.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, consciousnessphotography, landscape, light, mynyddoidd cambrian mountains, Poetry, time, Wales | Leave a Comment »
Some words make rivers to ride down seawards
Some words make rivers to cross over to another side
Some words make rivers wild and roaring falling from heaven
Some words make rivers thst are strange songs, strange and lovely
Some words make rivers that rend the earth, thst rend worlds, thst carve out new names
Some words make rivers thst are tears and memories and sorrows endless
All words flow from the same source to the same oceans in many worlds
All words live in the flow of breath and the woven web of minds
Some words and all words are born of landscapes and their passion
Born of need and born of beauty
Born of silence and born of reaching out
We are washed in words, their cool slip and drip
Drop by drop lost in words, drowned dreaming
Turned by words, stretched out and shattered by words
Made by words and cast adrift on words
Hollowed and hallowed and shriven by words
Healed and made whole by words.
Swept clean swept away swept up,
Found and lost in words
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Cwm Graig Ddu, landscape, language, mind, Mynnyddoidd .Cambrian Mountains, Otherworld.art landscape photography, Poetry, rivers of Annwfn, song, Taliesin, words | 1 Comment »
GHOST WORDS, HAUNTED WORDS
Do you know
What you are
When you are asleep?
Winter trees –
It is easy to see
What they are thinking.
A filigree of branches
The grey oaks
Wriggle their limbs
Between the long centuries.
Today I remembered
A dream of water
Perhaps from ten years ago.
And saying this
More some such arise,
Memories like dead poets:
Complete images in total silence.
It is easier to see the illusion
Of television
If the sound is turned down.
As if one entranced sense
Is not quite enough.
Awake whilst others sleep,
Somewhat like becoming a ghost,
I suspect –
Thoughts coming
In a different order,
And voices
From unexpected places.
What roads do thoughts take
When they have
Passed through
And left us wondering?
The fire is singing
Like an old man
Making tea,
Whistling a tune
Between his teeth.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged awareness, concsiousness, existence, mind, mynyddoidd cambrian mountains, Poetry, senses, thought, Winter | 1 Comment »
I thought I had posted this late last year, but cannot find it anywhere, so maybe I didn’t, after all. The winter skies of the Cambrian Mountains and whispers from Taliesin and the Ordovices, Iron Age tribe of the uplands.
THE HIGH PASTURES OF HEAVEN
About its turrets are the wellsprings of the sea.
Clouds wrap the mountaintops,
Rivers run full with meltwater.
The dear horizon is our fortress,
Saviour from the revolving sky,
Pinned back to harmony.
One voice that is not one voice
That is one voice, the mind
Of the poet on wandering roads.
How is the poet like a hedgerow?
A tangle of blackthorn inpenetrable,
Interwoven, sharp with sorrows,
It bursts into pure blossom,
Its fruits are bitter truth that sustains
Through deep frosts.
How is it that poets and flowers are alike?
None knows when the sweetest
Shall spring up, though the seeds
Are everywhere.
The centre of the land here is a silent fortress, ageless.
Held motionless, it remains
Whilst the seasons roll their seas
Across the valleys.
Such emptiness in a heart, so
One can hear the tumbling flows of feeling
Before they cloak themselves in sound,
The sound before the language,
The language before the meaning,
The meaning before the comprehension.
The ravens knit the valley airs.
The weight of beauty, near unbearable.
So in the centre is silence untamed,
Rolled psalms of poignant distance..
Each path, each road, only now here
Because of the thousand weary feet trudged before
With stick and dog following the fluttering,
Oblivious flocks to and from the high pastures
Of heaven, the summer pastures of delight.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Cambrian Mountains, landscape, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Ordovices, Poetry, skies, Taliesin, transhumance, tribal lands, uplands, Winter | 3 Comments »
THE THRUSH’S SONG
“I was a droplet in the air.
I was the radiance of starlight.”
I was a morning in late February,
Fresh with moments of green
And a wealth of birdsong.
I was a gradient of light
Sliding on the hillsides;
A calibration of sorrows
On the mountains;
A word somewhere between
Joy and sorrow.
A maker of firelight warmth
And a cup of hot tea,
A conveyance of small wonder
And a hunter of consideration.
The wind is light
And the clouds dissolving in colour.
The ground is waterlogged
And the trees become thirsty.
It is still silent on the road,
The paths still empty.
Their shadows hold winter,
Puddled, ice-blind eyes.
There is nothing that is not ordinary,
Nothing that is not wonderful.
The triple song of the thrush
Sings it all, again and again.
Praise for praise’s sake,
Word on word.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bardic recitation, birdsong, Cambrian Mountains, Dafydd ap Gwilym, February, Poetry, Taliesin, Wales | Leave a Comment »
THE CORNERS OF SPACE
Follow the sun beyond the horizon
And there will never be a sunset,
Never a horizon.
The old poets knew this – that their voice
(River and root of it) runs through distance
And no ends are there to those meanings.
Each sound, a door to deeper dimensions.
(No owls tonight, though a slivered, smiling moon.
Between the song of the pines and the river:
Restless tumbling dreams.)
Here is the vertiginous well of the sky
And its steps, and its chambers.
The view of horizons and their echoes.
(Confusion arises with questions:
Clouds billow and change shape;
Gravity has little hold in dream states
Except by habit.)
Circumference, the vastness of mind,
The corners of space, encompassed
By a single breath,
Dissolves on exhalation.
A rainbow disease brought to a stunning collapse –
Endless blue.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ancient bards, bardic traditions, Cambrian Mountains, dream states, landscape photography, light, meaning, memory, mind, mynyddoid cambrians, night, Poetry, space, time, Wales, words | Leave a Comment »
It is the rocks that make the river sing,
The world that gives us song.
Bones creak, branches heavy with snow,
Breath captured must release.
Spring will come.
—
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UNFOLDED
(Out of Taliesin)
I have been in many forms
But come back to this one:
Floating wingspread one,
Weightless and watchful,
A feathered arc, a bowl,
A cup of air brushed in
sunlight, wary, joyful.
(The wind has left a dust
Of snow on the far valley
Side, slate the dark sky
And the hills vanish
Like the living do, into
clouds of drifting whisper).
So easy it is to forget – a wonder
We do not learn it earlier.
And remembering: a dream
Patched from here and there,
The glue of emotion
The glue of regret.
A world unfolded from sound
And holding firm, fast spinning.
A potter’s wheel, potter’s hands.
Hollowed is blessed and so
I am hollowed and void.
Blood and breath, clod and clay –
A holy work to keep it
And let go of it.
(The trees bend and roar,
Their thoughts this droning chord.
A chant to the maker, blameless
Of suffering.)
These poets, suspended, becoming saints,
Hanging from the four directions.
Their parts scattered to make new worlds,
Their words taken literally, or buried,
A bed of seeds for Spring days
To play with.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged continuance, February, Irfon Valley, landscape, Poetry, presence, snow flurries, Taliesin, upland airs, Wales | 2 Comments »
By Breath
Awen, awel, gwen, gwyn.
By sound they collect, though not by derivation:
A poet’s excuse.
Biological etymology, a bloom of lichen,
Mutually supporting, intergrown,
What is not the same becoming
What is not different.
Inspiration, breeze, white, so white.
The mist effloresces, it becomes name.
The hunched woman, the crooked woman,
Behind it all, birth and death mother.
Ceridwen, overflowing awen, bright river racing.
Energy of remarkable stimulation, disperser of the seeds of wisdom
(The soot black severed-head seeds of alder,
The fine feather floating of willow and poplar, careless Gwion Bach).
Fresh water mixed with jet.
We shall reflect upon it, upon its depths,
Upon the mirrored world it shows,
The membrane, the drum skin,
The roof of the sky.
By breath from Ceridwen,
Hunched over, tight focus, mind sharp,
The cauldron within Annwfn.
The place where things are true and of themselves.
In the world
It is not the world it is, the most of the world.
The inner world, the deep, the profound.
Perception of patterns
(all that perception is, after all)
Ogrfen in awen, a phase of awen, a part,
Patterns of the world in the breath.
Witnessing the deepening of things as they are.
The Ideal peeking through the ordinary.
In a chant, in a repeating, in a breath in and out
And the sound between. Again and again.
I sing awen.
I bring it forth from the depth.
Awen in annwfn weighs and judges the worth.
Awen brings forth annwfn
Deep awen – ddofn awen
Deep awen of deep memory,
The deep, deep within the breath.
And what will it turn out to be, after all,
Except this: annwfn is the memory
Of all things, unreleased, unchanged, unforgotten,
Piled up, sunk down, absorbed, soaked through.
A saturation of patterns, a pathway etched,
A river chiselled, a dance dreamed in the heart
Of all matter, what matters, what holds together.
Between the two cataracts of the wind, between the
Song of the lungs, the heart fortress and its salt tides.
Not the words, not the tale.
The weaving of sounds, the way to go beyond
And beneath the meaning,
Lost in the music, the meanings trail behind.
Eiliad – the composition of poetry,
one second, one woven moment,
A weaving in time.
Rhythm defining time
Moving through time
Harmony created to memorise, remember.
The thrush singing the world away
Revealing the underlying presence of sacredness.
This high throne, this chair, this rock: a place of song.
Worlds reflected in the sound and rhythm,
Mirroring, transformed, switched.
A seething mist, a sunlit hillside,
Sound of distant traffic.
When time has run,
it gathers itself up
And remembers
And by this
Becomes free
From itself.
Eternal,
Golden.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Ancient Welsh poetry, annwfn, awen, bardic studies, bardic tradition, Book of Taliesin, cynghanedd, deep memory, music, orsl tradition, Poetry, Taliesin, the transcendent sound | 3 Comments »
THE WORDS WE COLLECT
It is the whispers in the walls,
The ghosts that breath upon our lips.
We dissolve, lost in sounds from elsewhere,
From rooms, from halls.
Left, empty enough, losing attention,
We step out of ourselves
And for a moment become monstrous,
Glorious shadows in the winds
Of strange, bright mornings.
Though none of it speaks for us:
The silent, swirling mists, nor
The resounding, thundrous deep,
Nor the wells without light,
Nor the stars without memory,
Nor the movement of seconds,
Nor anything of the vastness.
For all these are constrained
By our sound, and uttered unbeknownst
By those guilty of innocence.
Left dancing on air, breathless,
Pierced, spun to a fine point, examined,
Cast out, then disregarded.
Swimming in an ocean of shadows
It is hard to know what is of value.
I shall put my ear to the door of the earth,
And listen to the ones never dead,
A music not of our blood though equally holy.
Even its echoes dissolve flesh and name
In the round chambers, skull-domed,
Grass-topped and nibbled by sheep.
For the extraordinary rests upon the ordinary,
As sound rests upon its own silence,
The known is upon the unknown
As birds rest upon tall oaks in evening.
We live above the noise, dipped in cloud.
Hearing rumours of the dreams of others,
And building what we can out of that.
Once given a name, believing that makes us real,
Practicing a story sewn from fables.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ancestors, art, bardic, identification, identity, influences, inspiration, language, mind, Otherworld, photography, Poetry | 3 Comments »
simonhlilly 