A pearl day, smoke shaped.
A lick of mist this river’s voice.
Hills turn cloud, clouds become all.
A single dreaming moment
Explains everything.
More precious than breath
It lifts weightless, turns and dissolves,
Sky colours leaning out.
What was golden dulls to dust.
An aching tumble of sweet May,
A thorned white wave enthroned.
A season’s birth heavy laid,
A full descent, a grace,
An offered all, begun.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged beginning of summer, consciousness, daybreak, dream, ephemeral phenomena, hawthorn, landscape, mist, nature, perception, Poetry, reality, seasons, time, viewpoint | 2 Comments »
A DEMON’S ADVICE
But trust not your sighs to angels, ever.
They shall take each warming gust of breath,
Snatch and sew them swiftly to their own leaden wings.
So booted with heavy lustre and drunk on praise,
They hardly rise, flapping fiercely,
Singing golden geometries, scattering fiery alphabets.
Phosphorescent spinning flies,
Web-caught in luscious word.
Spider He bejewels them, soft and silk wrapped.
Dumb and fearless, a multitude of choiring gnats.
Only one thing the gods themselves fear, and that is disbelief.
And laughter, maybe, certainly, laughter.
And a free vote.
Not big on democracy are these deity.
No countenance for suggested alternatives.
If it’s a viewpoint you want, a demon’s your man:
All the angles, all the catch, all the numberless ins and outs.
Tried them all, tested, weighed, annotated, risks assessed.
Goat footed and fleet, we nibble nimbly across the cliff-faces
Of most portentious Glory, around the storm-flared nostrils,
The beetled brow, the forest eyebrows.
Ignoring the ineffable, we lick the salt of the particular,
The delicious and peculiar answer.
Down to earth, most rational, mathematical.
Solomon knew a thing or two, and that he got from us,
Smart man. You could do worse than converse.
Here’s a taste. A word or two in your ear….
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged a memorable fancy, angels, art, deity, democracy, demon logic, drawing, palimpsest, Poetry, points of view, politics, printmaking | Leave a Comment »
MERDDIN WYLLT BY THE FIRESIDE ( from Book of Voices)
I wear my clothes counterclockwise.
My shoes on backwards.
I know the squint.
The footprints, sprait and scent
Of demons and angels,
Know the words for weed and herb.
I tread with care, can recite
The tree of ancestors, the cries of beasts,
The line unbroken back
To warrior gods and giants.
And yet I cannot cast from me
The dream of endless cities,
The cantankerous clamour
Of the multitude, dull and deceitful.
I am good and bad with art and skill
Yet cannot unpeel from eyes this
Pall of paltry appeasements,
The children of lack walking
Endless square desolation
Who know too much,
But in the wrong ordering;
Whose priests draw paper gold
And silver dust
From bellies disbelieving and gnawed;
Whose bones grate chalk and sleepless;
Whose days neat piled and numbered,
A clarity of vast apathy, bright coloured
In flicker cold fires.
Stumbling through floods,
Warring ever the wrong foes,
Unbelieved, unbelieving,
A roaring tumble to consensual void.
We shall slam, it seems, to senselessness,
Yard by yard, ungrow, untend, untread,
Grow slim and thin and lustreless;
Leafless in Spring, sapless in dawn,
Know neither sun nor moon;
Shun light, fear dark, ignore warnings.
The stories new and feckless
Repeated endlessly, a lullaby
Of excuse.
Eaten up, burnt, gagged on smoke,
A scum of oil, a bitter silence,
A wormwood of tears.
—
( The Book of Voices will be a work of pieces arrived at by chance, words floated insistently at random times, other voices, mine or from elsewhere, who can say…)
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, black and white print, book of voices, decay, future visions, Merddin Wyllt, Merlin, photography, Poetry, seer | 2 Comments »
One more time
Words congeal,
Nest in dawn light.
Enough is the
Expanding breath,
Round, sent out blue,
Seeking peace.
Enough the slow fall,
Enough the dream.
One more time
Gathered, harboured.
Precise is the prayer:
Extinguish the
Hungry fire.
Only this:
That ceaseless hunger:
Cascading decay,
Mistaken for upwards.
A race diminished
Striving for worth,
Consumed and driven.
No art but blunder.
Graceless the fall.
In the pale of its cool,
In the wash of the mist,
In slowing breath and moment
Can we learn to rest easy?
Wanting nothing but enough,
As if we were the last
To ever be here.
Seeded in peace,
Dwelt and released.
A song sighed,
Never forgot.
A world haunted
With beauty
All remaining.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, biophilia, continuance, dawn, grace, hunger for more, Irfon Valley, landscape, landscape photography.pastoral, need, Poetry, survival, temperance, Wales, world | 4 Comments »
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.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged hawthorn, landscape, May, Poetry, summer | 13 Comments »
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.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ambience, art, landscape, photography, Poetry, rain, spring, Wales, weather | 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.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, being, dakini, dream, expanse, mystery, Otherworld contact, Poetry, printmaking, spring, the numinous, vision, wisdom | 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.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cold wind, despair, dreams lost, hollow voices, hope lost, lamentation, Poetry, wisdom | Leave a Comment »
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.
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 | 2 Comments »
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?
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Abergwesyn, art, awareness, folk lore, influence, landscape, Llanwrtyd, memory, Poetry, Pwyll Bo, saint, sentience, song lines, spirit, time, Wales, water | Leave a Comment »
simonhlilly 