NEW. YEAR’S DAY
A long blessing
Shunned and huddled against.
Rain in lines and columns –
Tall ghosts tramping flat the fields.
The valley crouches sodden,
Hill and distance dissolved to grey.
Things move as little as possible,
Only the sound of running water
Returning to restless distant seas.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged January, landscape, nature, New Year, New Year's day, Poetry, rain, Winter | 2 Comments »
UNDERPASS
Discarded words,
Crisp once now sodden spinelesss,
Losing colour
Swept down underpasses,
Damp and ammoniac,
An autumn of emotion,
Sullen sludge becoming inchoate wail.
Ripped from mind of one,
Falling into cascade of cliché,
The parcelled soap of millions,
Petty drama deified,
Rigorously abandoned
For the next scene.
Ghosts and leaves,
Both noun and verb
Are we become.
We have fallen into the sere….
Our own phantom menace,
The deeds we did and did not
Haunting the municipal paths,
Ifs and buts in overfilled bins
For late wasps of conscience
To drain some goodness out
And last the long winter
Sheltered in some crook of warmth.
Fire and fallen leaf
Flicker, send up incense,
A bonfire to remembrances
Found and lost,
Found and lost.
—–
A haunting image, subtle, empty, that graced the graceful words of Jessica Ryan’s blog post soveryvery.wordpress.com ‘One’s place’ is the spark for this flurry.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Autumn, emotion, landscape, leaves, memory, park paths, Poetry, remebering, urban emptiness, Winter, words | 3 Comments »
SMALL LAND
Small islands that float in the sifting blue:
Prayers, memories, wishes once hoped for.
Clear bounded, unto themselves,
Harvesting thin birdsong
And tumps of long grasses singing.
Fragments of heaven remaining,
Never lifted, never fallen.
Salt-washed, self-rooted.
Rock black and rock red
And the twist of serpentine,
The healed scar of whited quartz.
A skirl of wind,
An ululation of gulls.
Warmth in the lee
Of the byre,
The soft scent of hay.
A hymn, a verse each is.
Inhabited by angels,
Their messages forgot,
Dreaming to the sound
Of long tides.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged angel, dream, holy land, islands, landscape, Poetry, sea, thought | Leave a Comment »
CHRISTMAS CAROL SERVICE
What we refuse to see, we dream.
What we refuse to dream, grows strong.
The roots and stones we rest on, groan.
By day and night our laborious weight increases.
Mass and energy, the great fall, the future rise.
Reconstructed are our histories, our reasons.
It is the bones that remain.
It is the bones we clothe
With fragments of colour,
Rouge and tinsel.
They mock us who
Do not delight in story
(Failing to see they, too, live enfictioned).
The essentials of life are child-like.
Delightful is the minute and the hour of silence.
Sustaining is the simple breath, the still gaze.
Listen, not even the stars, not even they, shuffle nor stir:
The middle of the night coagulating cold.
No thing can be blamed for this,
No thing blessed.
No distinction, no judgement.
An infinite web of choosing there is,
An eternity of outcomes.
Each path, unsigned, is sought out,
Followed.
No goal but a calling home.
We have lost elegance.
We have lost the subtle shades.
Our cochlear spirals numbed
In loud foolishness, indocrinated false memories.
Sleight of hand – the key always was and will be, distraction.
Watch the bright light, the movement of the shiny.
The doctrine of no ghosts, neither holy nor profane.
The bones.
It is the bones that shape us.
The bones of the ancestors,
The bones of the children,
The hidden, red-marrowed, singing bones
Inside us.
Mortice and tennon, ball, socket,
Vessel, rope, sinew, glistening cartilage.
The slide and pull of grace.
The dance of staying in one place,
( an interchange of coming and going, being and forgetting to be).
What stirs us,
(I mean to say),
Is the equation of balance.
Number clothed in colour,
Colour clothed in light,
Light clothed in philosophy,
A weighing and positioning of fulcra.
Forgetting that stillness
Is not absence
But presence.
Holographic ideogram,
Mala, a string of meaning,
Where things slip between names,
Where a blink sees more than.
Circumstantial, peripheral,
Ephemeral shall I be.
Beams and motes –
A matter of simple perspective.
The opposite must also be true to itself.
The grinding down of bones,
A fertilising dust.
Tears frozen and thawed,
The watering of life.
Turn out the light, dear,
The stars shall be enough.
—–
There is little logic in the arts of Christmas, nor is there any one cultural imprint. It is a mish-mash of archetypes and long-loved mysterious imagery. Thus this wandering of thought and layering of idea that flowed from finger to page this morning…… Reaching and goodness and redemption though, must surely be worthy ideals to construct neural pathways around. Seasons greetings to all and all.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged archetypes, Christmas, creativity, distractions, elegance of the simple, endless possibilities, formulating immanence and the nebulous, glory, goodness, grace, guiding goodness, hidden languages.a request for beauty and frugality, imagery, masks, mental aptterning, multiple meanings, perception, peripheral insights, Poetry, storytelling, symbols, templates, what moves and awakens | 2 Comments »
WHITE SUN
A white sun
Drags low its cloak
Of long shadows.
The whispered song is
Fierce starlight,
Bitter winds.
Fast, small life,
This little wren
Dives into ivy,
Chiding sudden rain.
Standing still
To watch
An old pause
In time,
A breath
Caught, held,
Witnessed.
The dance melancholic,
A glory retained.
Satin, smoothed,
It slips
So swiftly by:
Shortest day.
—-
TEETER, THE BRINK
Now is the dark time.
What shall we do but sleep
Or light a lamp.
Illuminate, dream.
Mould our visions,
Plant good seeds
In hope.
The fast bleak grasp
Throttles sense,
Extinguishes
Simple warmth.
Small goodnesses
Are left us only,
And so they must suffice.
Trust in a return,
Slow or sweeping.
What is unlooked for
Yet remains.
To become unswayed,
To cherish, to succour.
Each one to their own dance,
A trace of footsteps
Leading back
From the cliff’s edge,
A whisper, a hand,
The ghost
Of a chance,
A good continuance,
A very garden.
—–
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art, Haiku-ish, hope, Poetry, prints, Solstice, standstill., sun, Winter | 16 Comments »
TURNED, GONE ON (requiem)
Stillness now, lost blue and empty silence.
After wracked storm, tearing breath,
Tangled rain. The howling
Has ceased, calm, calm.
Where sun reaches, there
Is hope of a little warmth.
But little warmth in shade,
Little warmth when the face
Turns away from light.
Calm void where you have gone,
Spacious, rested, freed from pain of time.
Naked void where you were,
Are, no longer.
The empty fields,
The stiff sloped horizon,
The days ahead unformed, vast.
These winter roads
Will lead to a surprise of spring,
But not soon, not soon.
Not before the world becomes ragged.
It must become ready, choosing, too,
Letting go what is,
Letting uncertainty bloom.
Too tired to breathe
One last slow, drawn out,
Whispered breath.
The void of skies
Fills slowly with new cloud dreams.
The scoured earth will clothe its scars
In new skins of green life.
The hollows will slowly fill,
The woods, they will be bound in birdsong.
It will become gentle, dancing once more.
But not soon,
Not soon.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged acceptance, death, emptiness, end of suffering, grief, lament, life, low sun, Poetry, reflected light, requiem, return, sorrow, storm, storm passing, web, Winter | 12 Comments »
I would wish this day,
Its singing silence,
To remain untarnished.
Its silver stations
Engraving motions of peace.
Unhurried, unabated
Tidal coolness.
Translucent vessel
Of breezes.
Unholy, unbound,
Unassumingly radiant.
Exhalant vapour,
Winter’s breath.
—-
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged advent, art, December, landscape, light, Poetry, stillness, Winter | 5 Comments »
ONE MOMENT
Falling, tumbled dreams,
Wisped, fragranced,
Catch, spin and fade.
Morning is white and still
With frost and fog.
Sparrows motionless, huddled,
Await the sun, on elder, on elm.
We are sustained only, it seems,
By our forgetfulness,
By our obsession to measure time
And watch it passing.
To fit and shape the minutes,
Assigning usefulness
Rather than joy.
Sad creatures,
Longing for the real,
And missing it.
—
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged being, fragmentation, landscape, lucidity, morning, Poetry, time, Winter | Leave a Comment »
simonhlilly 
Conversations with Invisible Friends 9
December 30, 2013 by simonhlilly
CONVERSATIONS with invisible friends (9)
DOPPLER
“Sound exists only
when it is going out of existence.”
And breath as it commingles
With time and blood.
Light, invisible
As it travels,
Until it strikes
And rebounds.
Sway and jigger.
We dance
Though these frozen
Words that so
Seem all to hold
Sane and steady.
—
VARIATION
The air, so cool and still
Between the raindrops.
A tunnel of whispering song,
A roar of percussion.
Roofs and gutters
Turn relentless descent
Into catalogues of dance.
—
CERTAIN
Darkness,
observed,
fills with points of light.
—
FRIENDS
Somehow,
a nest of snakes,
an Ouroborous,
a hiss of tasting,
an absence of beginnings and tail-ends,
a scintillation, perhaps a union of wisdoms,
a sine sign, sinuous, insiduous, sidelong.
An egg, druid’s,
serpents egg:
an unknown wonder, mind meetings,
strings, cat’s cradle, constellations,
caput draconis, circumpolar,
always circumpolar…..
we all,
we all rise and fall together,
weak nuclear, strong nuclear,
circumstantial, scribed, circumscribed,
elegantly drunk on small matters,
dark matters,
harmoniously various,
sustaining togethered.
—–
ANTIPODE
Every mirror
Never lies
But tells
The familiar tale
In reverse.
The truth
If any,
Neither one
Nor tother,
But floats invisible,
In between.
—-
MUSING
The dove
Of grace
Descends,
Sometimes called,
Sometimes shot.
—-
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged brief encountering, conversations, fragments, friends, inspirating, poetry comments, replies | 9 Comments »