DRIFT
A half moon wanes,
Floating on birdsong.
The world spins towards darkness,
And spins towards light.
Clouds stretched, skeined,
Soft-edged, rippling.
A drift, a slow drift
Into day.
This quiet time,
Twilit, a gift given
Before the goad of doing.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ambience, birdsong, dawn, landscape, light, moon, Poetry, quiet | 2 Comments »
VEIL
Here, embedded in small, lapsed
Suspended moments,
(Gossamer, silk, turning)
Too early, too late,
Webbed with inconclusive dream,
Stirred spirallings, seed of wind and light.
A weighing and disregarding
(The shallow confusions of purpose)
Sense and organs of sense
Bow to slow breath:
The fine, high transformation:
Time into space
Dissolving to time once more
(A thin cloth, this melting memory).
They sing,
Though there is nothing
To sing about,
They turn and wander
Unaccompanied, perfect,
These angels, these spirits,
These exhalations of earth.
A moist dawn air-
News from the sea,
Too soon for Spring,
Yet Spring has begun.
Moving on from now:
An arc of returning gravity
Held, pulled, this roaring love.
The eloquent have learned to
Separate and divide,
A weighing of threes
(These simple roads forgotten).
Coleridge would stir in sleep
Mud, slow drying, on coat and boot,
One fading leaf, one budding stem
Has all the answers
We shall ever need
An we blink
An we stay awake.
The slow sonority-
An old man tastes
The luxury of ancient language,
A fine whiskey
Sweet with smoke and bitterness.
His rhythm is a road across hillsides,
A road into morning.
A fine line
Dividing weeping
And contentment,
As it always is,
As it always
Is.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ancestral bones, awaiting, awareness, cascade and tuning, Coleridge, consciousness, dawn, distinction, dream, elegy, his angels, his ghosts, language, little or nothing, moment, orbiting, Poetry, solitary practice, Sorley MacLean, spring, the ghost of Blake, tradition | Leave a Comment »
STORM DAYS
This hollow, unrevealed sky.
Dipping, a magpie attempts a new meridian,
A straight flight to food or shelter.
The dead elms’ reaching fingers quiver;
Power chords, the cables roar.
We each and all must huddle and endure,
With the sparrows, with the ever joyous,
Garrulous sparrows – delicate and subtle
In their design, a clutch of heartbeats,
Warm, communal.
No malevolence in the weather.
No malfeasance in the storm.
Another day to sing about.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged birds, February, flight, grey days, landscape, magpie, moments, more rain, nature, nesting, Poetry, rain, shelter, sparrows, storm, weather | 4 Comments »
RETURNING SONG
Before daybreak,
In quieter airs,
A smaller dawn.
As a blackbird sings,
Before the hint of light,
An old man settles,
Rises,
Releases,
Returns.
Leaving the complexity, leaving the overlay of moments,
We are a simple tune, one or two notes,
A nursery rhyme, guileless,
Needing no elaboration.
Leaving the moments, leaving the overlay of complexity,
We are, always have been, a little dance, a gesture,
A ripple, delighted perturbation,
Needing no justification.
Yesterday on a distant coast,
Storm waters uncovered footprints
Left and right, made by wanderers
Nine hundred thousand years ago.
Traces return, unexpected,
Vanish, unexpected.
These roaring tides, these sands,
These comings and goings,
Noticed, unnoticed.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged being, dawn, death, father, memory, moving on, remembering, requiem, time | 8 Comments »
Four pieces from early this morning, ancestral mutters: sky crowns and words from the Anglo-Saxon.
SIGNIFICATOR
The whispers of the stars of dawn,
Rooted in deep paths, seated mind.
Mind that seeks names only,
Seeks genealogies, plumbs down fathoms,
The pitch of rightness.
To themselves they whisper,
Remembering the weave and twist of gold,
The movers in the shadows,
The movers of twilight,
The flickering torchlight,
The muffled, shuffled feet of steady procession,
Of circular dance taking up positions,
Constellations of mirrored geometries
Winding up time before babes yawn,
Before the aches of morning stretch and sigh.
Before the biting cold, the stirring of embered dawn.
Before has passed.
Before has misted away.
The whispered eloquence of now,
A tranquil moment turned and knotted,
A place remembered on a silent road:
Signpost, crossed paths, significator.
—-
FIRE PRAYER
I kneel, cold water,
Before the fire to kindle,
A prayer for light and warmth:
Cold water, flying cloud.
For spark and roaring:
Cold wave, cold tide.
For return of belonging,
For reason to remain.
—-
WANDERER
The lament of the dispossessed –
The long diminishing curlew.
The urgent, soft cries of lovers –
Wild geese, wild geese.
The road is a way but not a home.
The footsteps of others, small consolation
When they have vanished to the horizon,
Gone on before, singing the old song.
Cloud-cloaked wanderer tasting salt.
His children, weighed metre,
The lilt of left and right.
—
ACHE
Raked by claws
(This wolf cold).
Blood stain tumbling
Clear watered pools:
These clouds of squall
In dawn skies.
World’s ribs sigh
And shiver –
The ache
Of onwards.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged February, fire, hearth, landscape, morning, paths, Poetry, roads, sky crowns, stars, storm, the wanderer, Winter | Leave a Comment »
VALLEY SPIRIT
Over the last hill
Our prize is the view
Where the village nests,
Wood wreathed, woodsmoke.
Gathered fields almost,
Almost ready for spring
But patient, cautious,
Unhurried.
As unhurried as the morning.
Its grey lambswool clouds,
A blanket for Imbolc.
—
CROSS-HATCH
Imbolc morning:
Clouds like wolves,
And sheep.
Sun on all.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Devon, February, Haiku-ish, Imbolc, landscape, morning, nature, Poetry, seasons, time, weather | 2 Comments »
DAWN CHORUS AND MOMENTS OF FROST
As if this feather, slow-turning, falls,
One breath of ice, branching blades
Arcing ghosts of fern, arced ghost of forests.
Pinioned cold, eager, aware, edge fractured.
Fingertips feeling for pattern, the familiar
Stretched pale, translucent.
As the scattered, sprinkled pierce of sound,
Woven between moonlit pale dawn wind,
Tumbling, cascades and choirs,
A flurry of beak and breast-soft down.
As all life joined up by song,
No less, no more meaning than this.
Small hearts full and pouring,
The vessel, vehicle, of the world.
No more and no less than this:
The opening of small mouths,
The fast tremble of accepting hearts.
Light now, and slow revolutions through space.
This place, placement, placid, pellucid.
Transcendent fingers frosting fine feathers,
Growing, though not grasping,
Water flowers framed in ice.
Small time, halted, crystalline.
Slow arcs of how things are,
How they happen.
Seen, unseen, diverted, amalgamated.
Dawn chorus and the moments of frost.
Suspended breath, then
Light and song.
No more, nor no less
Than this.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged before dawn, birds, coincidence, dawn, dawn chorus, expansion into space, frost patterns, landscape, mind, moon, nature, Poetry, silence, Sound, unity, Winter | 6 Comments »
On long tides
The rivers rest.
Longer than
Long moments
Of memory.
Swaying words
Swinging between meanings.
Lost days
Remembered and forgotten,
Sweet details, seasons.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged languid, memory, mind, moments, Poetry, seasons, thought, tides | 2 Comments »
TALLIS EXULTANT
Golden moon rests
Upon a throne of low cloud.
All night long-
As bright as day.
Dawn shall not diminish her:
Sinking radiant
Into new lands.
A long music,
A choir of days.
Tallis exultant.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged atmosphere, dawn, full moon, landscape, light, moon, music, nature, Poetry, Thomas Tallis, world | 2 Comments »
