TRANSIENT 5
A day of slow skies
Testing new brightnesses.
Cwm Dwfnant is lost
In dreams of cloud once more.
In the green centre
The river whispers
And the crows feel that
Spring is near now, over the hills,
And sunlight, too,
In the slate and stately rise and exhale.
A sleeping world,
Dreaming of waking,
Dreaming of a small unfolding.
—
TRANSIENT 6
Tinder, the horizon.
Laid just so
With blue on blue
To catch spark and roar
Come sunrise.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, changing light, dawn, landscape, light, Mid Wales, photography, Poetry, skies, spring, Wales | 2 Comments »
Transient (4)
Skies of palest violet,
An uninhabited eye
Whose souls are words.
An unimaginable wind
Blows light in waves
across the hills.
Like heaven,
the snowfields rise above,
Hardly visible, their glimmering.
A village of daffodils sways.
The jackdaws freefall in joy.
There is ice in the buckets
And all the farms roar with fires
For the lads and lasses hunched
With cold hands
From a long night’s lambing.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, dawn, landscape photography, light, Poetry, spring, Wales | 2 Comments »
TRANSIENT 3
The light that paces
The valley floor
Graces hearts with
Its bright and stately shade,
Reminds the soul
It ever ends and begins again,
That nothing, not one breath,
Remains more
Than one
Scintillating motion.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, landscape photography, light, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
The words
of the sea
Roaring drunk
And glorious
in endless sunlight.
He has squeezed through
regardless,
Touching the soon
And the many.
He knows that
Poetry is
not the words.
Words
are what remains
When poetry has flown.
Flown like a bomb,
like a sunrise,
In all directions,
too great for human kind,
But not the soul,
singing, silent, watching
In endless birth,
the reason beyond itself.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged a certain Welsh Dylan, art, landscape photography, Poetry, Wales | Leave a Comment »
Spring sun.
All is forgiven.
Though the bitter wind!
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Haiku-ish, landscape, Poetry, spring, sun, weather, Winter | 1 Comment »
At the Heart of Yew
1
As it were,
Between slow chimes round, sparkling moments spill,
Skitter, bounce, slide
across cold marble.
Nothing remains to hold onto.
This is how it feels, numbed and white with wonder,
A mind subdued, language pared back to root,
A constellation of starlit echoing, free from constraint of pattern.
Absent is the comfort of story.
2
Through animal veins the forest branches roar.
The voice of the earth whispered thunderously.
A clearing storm that will favour no being
Above any other.
3
More fearful than this
infinite, swaddled and senseless dark
Is the single flash of light that illuminates all.
You would not believe it were so,
How everything
becomes its opposite.
4
And the small, small voices
bright as needles, cold as rain in summer,
Melting the defining edge, weighing innocence.
5
No view but the stars,
no voice but the stars
No answer but the stars.
They fall and rise,
ripening red and white,
the bitterness of their light
Will wake the sleeping,
will wake the dead.
6
The bright thin eye of the wren,
the sweet rich tongue of the dunnock.
Squeezed and rolled, the buttress trunk folded upon itself,
Sediments of light and time
extruding green needles into quivered silent air.
Fermentation of dream and myth, a searched-for language
That roots in the atlas, the convolute backbrain,
The sequence of pushing through,
the tangled mass
Holy folds haunting bone.
7
Tumbling towards boundlessness,
dear misconception treasured,
our only possession.
This is not part of the story-
we wanted wings and crowns, sunsets sipping wine,
A simple validation of good and bad,
a certainty on the chain,
a place on the ladder,
Forever forgetting, of course, the wheel that turns,
the hub that crushes, the severing spokes
The wheel of the law.
this tree revolving upwards,
rolling downwards,
waiting in darkness.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged consciousness, dream, perception, photographs, Poetry, reality, vision, yew tree | 8 Comments »
TRANSIENT 1
This day
So full
Of veils and doors.
Rain-washed, wind-swept,
Metal bright:
Cold hills, copper burnished;
sky walls swagged and pewter blue.
Rivers fast and thick as soup,
Wavetopped, roiled, cascading down.
Pulpit trees proclaiming
Spring is near, but not yet.
Radiant light and broken rainbows,
And the scattered white heads of snowdrops
Praising the quiet corners,
And the drunken roar
Of storm winds.
—
TRANSIENT 2
Rain curtains the valley.
Like the dead
The hills are invisible
But still with us
(Breathing different air,
Dreaming slow, deep dreams).
Hymn-makers come from here,
Praisers of the Intangible.
(The hawk’s cry and the
Sighing grasses and the
Oaks in the lee of the wind.)
It is a short enough life
Not to sing out praise,
Not to wonder at it,
Not to search out the right words
And the tune of the soul-
A counterpoint to the heart-
And the rhythm of footsteps
Down the winding roads.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged landscape.landscape photography, light, Llansteffan church, movement, Poetry, rain, spring, storm, Wales | 4 Comments »
Gathered In
There in its branches
All the dead are gathered.
And there they sing,
Bright as ivy berries
Whilst angels, like winter wasps,
Sip grateful and murmur
a psalm of houses.
There is this, and nothing but this:
A gathered slow change
From one, shared endlessly with the other,
Wrapped and stretched,
Wriggled and feathered.
A rope of souls arcing
The deep between lonely stars.
And the slow pools,
And the fast river of seconds
Washed away-
Breathed in, breathed out,
And in the silences between:
The wind in the dry leaves
And the creak of limbs
Tangled from rusted iron rails,
And shattered blooms of stone
And words in an old tongue:
Here lies, in memory of, the memory,
The memory itself.
One that was, gone now beyond crumbled edges,
Melted skin, up to the snowline,
Down to the river pastures.
Gone to the hairy down-soft snakes of ivy;
The hard, blood-thin flakes of yew;
The bitter tang of elder, caught right there
At the back of the throat;
The delightful bruised scent of ground-ivy
And the small violet day.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged burial ground, Cefn Gorwydd, deep ecology, landscape photography, life, Poetry, synergy, transformation, Wales, yew tree | 2 Comments »
Sunlight and whispers,
Bright rolling silence.
There is no confusion here:
All things fall fearless
Against the movement
And the stillness
Of hours and their dust.
Footsteps all forgotten
(Puddle, pool, stream, river)
Nothing but the distance of the past
And the distance of the future
(And the skylark remembering both).
The diagonal slide of sun and moon and stars,
Tides of light and shade,
The constant abrasion of the wind.
It hardly breathes, so still it is
In its rising and falling distances.
The silent rolling hills of heaven.
These uplands spread out
Like God’s own hands
On the first Sunday,
Sun-warmed skin stretched pale
Over rippled knuckles,
Bone resting quiet,
Muscle and tendon singing.
Sky-touched, the first moments,
Cloud thoughts, the pale waving grasses,
This click of warming rock.
—-
The Elenydd is the old name for the central uplands of Mid Wales, known as the Cambrian Mountains. The southern border is effectively the Irfon Valley, where I live, though in actual fact the valley is bordered on its other edge by the Mynnedd Epynt, a very similar landscape.
The Elenydd is a very ancient mountain range worn down to a high bog and grassland plateau cut deeply by streams and rivers
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, Cambrian Mountains, distance, Elenydd, landscape photography, Poetry, silence, space, uplands, Wales | 2 Comments »
Time slides as the seasons slide,
One into the other.
As the sun slides and the moon slides.
Time slides as the days slide,
Toppling over and over,
Rolling as the sun rolls, as the stars roll.
Garn Goch is covered in cloud again.
A slow drift, wordless love.
Seeds of rivers, seeds of seas,
Collecting on the stiff sedge
That lodges between the tumbled rock.
All slides on,
A smooth falling dance
Through winter, through spring,
Through summer.
A green slide and a grey slide,
Sun and rain.
A slow smoke rises, offered.
River mist: opaque as snow, radiant.
And the calligraphy of oaks.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Imbolc, landscape photography, Mid Wales, morning, Poetry, the seasons, time, Wales, Winter | 5 Comments »
simonhlilly 