still one field there is
left in sunlight
the storm rolls in,
a line erased, erasing
a wall tumbled
in grey whispers
it lifts at the river.
for a moment
we see the upper slopes
of pine
and then the hiss
and thrum of it.
a world dissolving
diagonally
in sound.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Haiku-ish, landscape, light, Poetry, rain, sensation, Wales, weather | Leave a Comment »
Ystrad FFlur 2
one door in an empty field.
a pattern of stone,
the chantry coves.
clouds are sheep and cattle
drifting slowly out of sight.
but for the peace you would not know
poets and kings were buried here.
we cannot stay
but maybe never leave,
like the pilgrim stream
whispering prayers
on cool, light feet.
like the tinted copper beech
and the hollowed yew.
like the faith of thousands
and the recitation of the birds.
the green edict of grass
has covered all dissent.
a spiral stair ascends
into empty air.
the old names adhere somehow,
the slow erosion of autumn rains.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged holiness, landscape photography, memory, Mid Wales, Poetry, sacred space, Strata Florida, tradition, Ystrad Fflur | 2 Comments »
YSTRAD FFLUR (Variations)
1
Flower valley, quietness complete.
To count the short years of the living,
To count the longer years of the dead.
2
Stones warmed by long late summer sun,
Dew still wet past midday, tears for the lost,
Prayers for them.
3
One arch, one door opening onto blue sky.
A strong door it must be
To have lasted the closing
of so many centuries.
4
Billowed on Deheubarth
Dreamed green weight.
An illuminated landscape
A foliate scroll, inhabited-
The whispers of history.
5
One stone archway,
aisles dew carpeted,
nave ribbed in cloud.
The constant choir is this little stream,
and sheep distant on grazed hills.
One yew of many remains
where the poet robin nests.
Pine and dark beech the only roofs now,
the wheeling kite the only call to vespers.
6
A vessel worn smooth with prayer heals yet and shall forever,
Blessed by its past and the dreaming dead.
A valley wide with flowers, a road ended in tranquillity.
7
Flower valley.
Nothing but peace.
Emptied of longing.
Rested under heaven.
—-
—
Ystrad Fflur ( pronounced ust rad fleer) is the Welsh name of Strata Florida Abbey in Mid Wales, north-east of Tregaron. It means ‘valley plain of the river Fflur’, but in Latin has become ‘Flower Valley’. Little remains here except an archway and foundations, but the site and location are memorable in their tranquillity and history. Strata Florida held the official records of the Welsh Kingdoms and actd as the religious heart of the country. A well-known poet Dafydd ap Gwilym (14th century) is said to be buried under the yew in the churchyard. Deheubarth was the name of the Kingdom here. The Nanteos Cup, believed by some to be a contender for the true Holy Grail, was kept at Strata Florida before the dissolution of the monasteries. It was famed for its miraculous healing powers. We visited on a misty, sunny day in late summer. It has a similar atmosphere and sanctified silence to Iona in Scotland, the same intangible presence of history and vigilance.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, history, landscape, photography, Poetry, ruins, Strata Florida Abbey, Wales, Ystrad Fflur | 5 Comments »
SUNSET 10 (This Some Summer Sunset)
This some summer sunset,
Not enough of it even to work out
Which what words and as to emotions, feelings, memories,
It is a splash, a fat man’s belly flop
Makes sense, makes no sense.
We dress up time so, we dress up space,
With word and cause and story so,
Do we not? Do we not, instead of
Instead of knitting it in, gobbling it,
Consuming it, we pick around the edges
What is this? Do I like this? Like kids.
Don’t like beans. Don’t like. Do I like?
What is it I wonder gets in the way.
Is it these words, this mind minded to disturb all things
By poking around what is it? What is it called? What do you do? What do you do?
What is it for? Better to ask what do you not do.
Where are you void. More likely , then, perhaps, perhaps.
Well then, well then this sunset, end of day, end of moment.
Everything left is squeezed out – warmth, light, colour
In one last something. Not a moment not a fraction. A slide,
A dance, a declining breath, an elemental, really an elemental thing
Pushing buttons, or maybe that is just a weak poetic nature, words over deeds
Thinking over doing, a subsidence, a changing.
As much an entity as a breathing heart-stopping being is.
As much a smiling, frowning, complaining
Finite living, dying, changing thing.
The words will not do, they dance around, they are neither photographic
Nor autobiographic, nor philosophic. Generated, self-generated, unreached,
A mystery, so to say.
A mystery and a vast thing bursting in, changing, erupting, leaving as if,
But not as if it had never been, changing everything.
It cannot, thus, be described. An ocean of infinite depth
Pouring through a door ajar. All ghosts, all thoughts, all breath, all all
Led westwards in a blaze and then gone to a different silence.
Is and is not is. How things are. What the sages know. What drives us mad.
What we forget. What we long for. To be taken up within it.
The chariot of the warm sun and carried under the earth,
bones trailing rainbow light ’til we all emerge
Tentative then radiant, but always utterly forgetful,
Into the dawn.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, eisteddfod, interpretation, landscape, language, Mid Wales, perception, Poetry, sunset, Wales | Leave a Comment »
SUNSET 6 ( only one, and not even that)
There is only one moment, and not even that
As it slides between words spluttering the certain.
There is only one breath, and that has left us as we find another
Between noticing and forgetting the wondering of it.
This is the only sunset, and not even that as it rises and fails
Sudden with colour brash and tender.
One moment gone, one breath, all changed,
One colour impossible to name.
Life becomes fragments if it is held still, perfection palls
And is deemed a failure by universal canon.
The word, a particular curse of our natures,
An intelligence of demons. Too clever by far.
All nouns are lies, all adjectives suspect.
All thoughts – an endless twittered birdsong
In a forest of neurons.
All dreams – a continuing rumble of juxtaposition,
A sunrise and sunset, of edge and horizon,
A slipping through gaps.
Avoidance of the void is the creation of pain and of beauty.
Race westwards: eternal sunset.
Race eastwards: eternal dawn.
Each view only as true as its edges.
Each poem, a breath to be neither accepted or rejected,
Not certified nor censored.
A sign of something passing by, that is all.
Cloud banks over a setting sun,
Hills caught golden, pricked out and pounced.
Delineation of the immeasurable.
A noble picture, or perhaps an articulation of foolishness.
A fragment of eternity rushes by.
The emperor sits on his throne and does nothing,
Yet all revolves about him.
The old sage leaves by the western gate.
No one see his ox cart winding down the road.
He whistles to himself between his teeth
A folk song of the river and the moon.
The sun has set now.
The lights of the distant city begin to show.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged language, meaning, Poetry, space, sunset, temporality, time, words | 1 Comment »
This life now gone:
A storm of rainbows,
A bowl of fragrance,
An utter song of views.
How to hold the fullness of it?
How to honour the living of it?
How to conceive the lap and swell
Of that one full ocean of sensation?
One eternal unfolding memory,
A tumble of heartbeats.
These every jewelled moments
Are seeds flung back into universal soil.
Never lost, always cherished,
A fuel for dear futures.
They are collected: each breath, each moment.
Valued, priceless passion,
Tears in the bright eye of being,
Tears in the flow of all beings.
Mother, mother, a soft delight,
All burdens borne away,
All pains a cauldron,
A chrysalis swirled
Awaiting new dream
On a new day.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged death, life, memory, mortality, obituary, Poetry, remembrance | 1 Comment »
SUNSET 4
It is what prayers are for
And the memories of drunks,
The dear, tattered fragments of stones.
It will take no longer than the words to describe it.
A moment’s graceful decline as if space were brimmed with light,
As if matter were always blessed in glory.
A graveyard of poet’s eyes, their stumbled tongues,
Overblown or stunned to silence.
Do not take longer than this:
A breath deepened and slow.
One hill, then another, turns golden, then fades.
We become pictorial, the tattered end of day,
A blush of its colours remembered one last time.
Blink the eye, scar the memory, stain hearts with fire
And rekindle love of life.
It is what music is for, to taste the nameless moments,
To delineate the tides of between.
It is not for words that so wrap themselves tight
To squeeze out reasons and meaning.
A sigh to the west for the forlorn and forgot,
A pellucid madness perfected for sinners
Each breath shackled to an infinity without eternity.
It is always somewhere, this passionate moment, rolling westwards
An irreducible heartache, cast clods of cloud and colour
As it skids its wheel in the soils of the next horizon,
Slides through the octaves of light.
—
Another of the ‘sunset’ poems. They mostly cover the same concepts in differing proportions and different tonal voices. As I re-read and make some slight adjustments I feel slightly more kindly towards them…
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, landcape, landscape photography, Poetry, sunset | 2 Comments »
DAWN AS BLUE
Dawn,
Blue as Mary’s robe ripped with tears
A new born sun all night under the earth
Bursts up golden forgetting forgiving all else.
The small things of the wood, the small things of the valley,
Too hungry to watch, praying, breathing, forgetting and forgiving.
The honey waters of heaven collect cool and sing a river’s song.
They carry the names of hills down to the sea
And the blessings of breezes back again.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged dawn, Irfon Valley, landscape, light, nature, Poetry, river, space, sun, time, Wales | Leave a Comment »
Sun Set
1
One moment –
Poured out,
Completely
un o brid
arllwys allan
bentigiydd
2
drunk on visions
a sunset slurs westwards.
Too mad with poetry,
it splutters and abides
to a more seemly twilight.
3
a friction of moments set ablaze
dowsed sober and silent,
a splintered, imperfect thing.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Haiku-ish, landscape, Poetry, sunset | Leave a Comment »
AR GOF 1
There now, pay no more attention to the lilt,
that may or may not be a fine day to the minds of others.
For it is all an amalgamation, anyway, with slivered choice
except the slow or fevered narration of it.
A voice will step forward, a pen will slide across paper.
(Just make it legible, eh? There is no telling what will
weigh in memory and what float off – much like these hills
that so often vanish into white distance and the leaning rain.)
Start from this place. A certain particular. A landscape of betweens.
North march the Cambrians. South, Mynydd Epynt. Great uplands
that funnel light and wind, two hands cupping the buoyant air.
And between them, two rivers. One called ‘river’,
the other, ‘dark water’. Between them, a backbone of rock,
rising inclining, steady to the sky. A spine, a fold from which
green fields reach and splay. A high road, once named
St. David’s Precinct, now defrocked to only ‘ edge of the forest’.
And so closer now, to the middle of things, by here,
a stone grey hulk of chapel, a beached ark, a barn of piety,
hunkered and silent between dutiful houses
packed close against the wind, west walls shingled,
chimney stacks smoking.
Goshen, it is named by irony or accident: sheep fields
of the faithful, set aside from the urbane and city lights
to avoid any unpleasantness from the uncouth and nomadic blood.
The chancy drovers of old languages tumbling half-drunk with visions
down winding trodden paths,
the sophisticated manners of moneyed gentility,
seen through and through in a side-glanced moment.
A self-chosen people, herded Godly and righteous,
(at least on Sundays, and a sharp eye kept all the days in between).
Stranded, stretched between all kinds of dizzy heights
down the generations, down the piled up, counted up centuries,
Surviving the seasons until the last, sighed breath puts them
tented under the ground, wandering lost and happy as sheepdogs
Amongst summer flocks and the lowing, sleek flanked cattle of stars.
They drift, on this and that tide, but ever anchored-
The painter of faith knotted firm to the chapel door
And the names in stone ‘ar gof’, still clear enough
for trumpeting angels to read
when time comes round to end for one last time.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged axis of all things, Cefngorwydd, churchyards, Gosen Chapel, landscape, Mid Wales, place of the dead, Poetry, the dead, Wales | 5 Comments »
simonhlilly 