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Posts Tagged ‘ancestors’

And they are still here
Still beneath the land
Protesting the desolations
As ravens do on heather banks.

And they are still here
Too proud to move or sway
Driven down, weathered and grey
As their own gateposts, slowly
Laminating, word on word,
One purpose losing its one memory.

And they are still here
Though always leaving.
The language of rivers
Muttered on slated lips.
Eyes closed,
Dreaming on hilltops.

They are still here
Initials carved on tumbled stones.
The neat hearth scattered,
Black earth, cold fire,
Comfort lost.

They are still here on
The cool breezed morning,
In dew bright hollows,
On silent roads
Sunlit, full of hope.

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these old poets:
smoke blue hills,
smoke blue clouds.
they rise up so,
they reveal themselves
and are curiously hidden,
conversing with vapour
between worlds
unmeasured, unfathomable.
they loom, nonetheless,
and shape the world.
it is from there
the clear waters fall,
from fell and moor
to feed, to wash clear our eyes,
to fill with song untranslateable,
echoing down the spine,
deeper than eye and brain,
deeper than soul,
into the bowels,
into annwfn,
the dark mysterious,
fecund deep.
rolling, these storm fast vowels,
ancestral to the blood.
this they prove:
there are no new songs.
just old songs
with new words,
old songs
with new tunes.

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Preseli Meditations (Rock Signs)

Eye
Is a palindrome,
As is
Sees.
Voices distant
Speak in tongues
From cracks in rock
Split open by light.

Split open
By light
A heaven swing
Through star roads.
A cloud hymn
And the sing of insects.

The sing of insects
Deep in winter.
Sunlight clicks
Its fingers.
One door opens.
Another closes.

Another closes
Creeps seeps
Through the
Butter of time,
The honey of space.
Dressed in bones
They come
Rolling down
With news
From heaven.

From heaven
Fingers prise
The smallest chink.
An eye blinks
The mirror
Cracked becomes
A door.
Backwards the
Paths lead
Backwards to
The beginning.

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MIND STREAMS

(for ‘Book of Voices’)

There is a landscape
Knitted over with slim streams.
Bright and dark, loud and whispered,
Each, eternal threads worming
Stories of thought and thoughtlessness,
Stories of song and reasons and whys.
Whole histories, whole epochs, whole aeons.
A continuity of dream, a muttered heart.
A thousand voices vying for eyes,
A turn of attention, an immersion in,
An interpretation of, an affirmation.

Some sing, some skirl, some shout.
Golden chained, ear to tongue,
A merry dance, a forced march.

There is a dark, tangled tree.
From my tongue it pours sap
Through throat and lung,
Wrapped to rooted loins.
A lean language, tango Argentinian,
A whipcrack thing, sinuous sine,
Insinuous, inescapable, one
Of a number of souls.

(On the black hill, a scattering of snow,
The bare trees spell out the names
Of distant saints born from rivers,
All borne to the sea, a tidal deity
Coming and going, coming and going.)

I carry with me, pelican-like,
All the souls, black and noisy as jackdaws,
On the tree from the mother inhabited
Down to now, a flock of sharp eyes
And voluble tongue……

—-

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1
We are, after all,
Nowhere other than here:
Held in the soil-stained hands
Of earth.
Held as a wish, a dream,
A joy, a grief.
Gone home to rest, to be cast,
To be moulded, kneaded.
To be on the cycle,
To be recycled,
To be returned,
To be cherished.

2
The dream was of the great circles, Stonehenge, Avebury. Their function, to stop people “falling through earth”. To set them back on the wheel in the right cycle, the right place.
Using the right quality of sound and space, the right length of rod, the self-healed, snake-strewn ground.

3
Drawn up awake
But dreaming.
Brought all to the rivers
By moon-faced reflection:
The one face.
Drawn out awake
Yet asleep, soul’s home
Bright revealed.
Pierced by blade and bleeding,
Held, not allowed to fall through,
We shall be returned, given life.

Turned, turned , the road become moonlight.
Flesh golden, stripped of burdens,
Certain ratio, a spell of line and curve,
Placed on the wheel,
A language of trajectories,
Forces multiplied and compensated,
An art of vectors, of prophecy,
A heft of distinctions.
Revived with tongue and breath,
A dance in footprints,
The learning of a song,
Its thousand thousand verses.
Its drummed rhythms
Its curses, its blessings.
Jewelled serpent:
Her back, the path of the sun.
Remember,
Those of you who know,
The bite, the sting, the knowing.

4
There shall be three:
The child, the man, the woman.
Eternal, bound, faceted.
In threes the remembrance.
In threes the curse.
In threes, the healing….

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SNAKE SPIRAL TORC

We slide spiraling
Ferociously nonchalant
Eyes on fire, laughing.

The tumble of sun on sun
The silk whisper, pale moonlight
Equations piled up,
The footprints marking time,
Precise dancers through space.

A knot upon hillsides,
A marching shadow in the valley.
Enchained to the motion,
Slave of raw power, sudden beauty.

This is our sign.
That we dance the dance
Between dusk and dawn
According to the paths before us.

spirit dancers text1

A continuation of my sporadic project to re-introduce Iron Age Celtic imagery and world-view into the world art vocabulary and other grandiose schemes…..

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KEY SEVEN
(Faerie Travellers)

Cap of invisibility,
Cap of indivisibility.

From whence do the elements separate?
From the instant of central balance.

From what flows the certainty of form?
From the heartbeat between what was
And what will be.

At the corner of sight:
Eyeblink or distant lightning?

What you know will blind you.
The oldest foundations are no longer in sight.
The ancestors watch this world,
All have names, sing their genealogy,
Have woven you.

Sink into the weave,
The world wears you.

Wear yourself lightly
Leaving no footprints.

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KEY TWO
(Stones of Callanish)

Starlight
Ripples outwards.
Past, present, future, sitting down
To feast at the same table.
The ancestors from whom we descend
Graciously remain;
Their old,wrinkled faces,
Their stone fingers,
Reveal the bones, extracting
Meat and marrow:
This is where eternity crystallises.
This is where soul, stone and star converse.
Procession of coincidence.
Listen:
The music of time.

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STONE LORDS

Our tall hats, sky scraping, cloud stirring,
Raking, forming, our tall hats.

Our black hats, cliff-crag dark,
Storm dark, night full.
Our black hats.

Given by the lords of years,
These moving towers, rocking.
These watchtowers,
These habitations of watchers.
Given us.

Watchers, sky-full of silence.
Hawk-bright shaded eyes,
Biding behind dark brows,
We bide,
Dark browed.

We need not hands to raise against.
Need not fingers to point.
Nor voice to accuse,
Nor clever, subtle speech,
No invective.

Poise, presence,
Inscrutibility fledged beneath
The stern circle of dark rim.
Tall hats, dark hats, bestowing gravity,
Beacons of authority.

Rock dreaming,
Injected, a bolus of catastrophe.
We, the chorus,
Mocking your wriggled evacuations.
We shall never, as you will, now
Pass distraught, hand-wringing,
Rote excuse for skin.

We shall never squirm nor flutter,
Racing thither on dismal errand,
Bending brightness to aggrandise vapour,
Bending sense, roping goodness,
Making slave-chains to chafe the free.
Oh, we see clear.
We see your oily wishes,
Your sly agreements.
How you stain the day.
How you stain.

Our tall hats
Shall follow your ways.
Watch us on the heights.
Watch us circle dark valleys.
Unencumbered vigilence,
Patient for judgement,
Implacable,
Undeceived.

May your tiny,
Malevolent souls,
Naked and revealed,
Shrivel.
May your rights
Recycle to the innocent.
May the wheeling carrion birds
Revolve and clamour
Til you no more sully
This earth, this sky.
May you relinquish your folly
Before it plagues and howls,
Extirpating your breathing memory.

—-

Born from a recounted dream of handless beings guarding the clifftops from the perennial parastic politicians who wore tall black top hats. Reminded me of the crags of the Preseli hills, the watchers of Easter Island, the tall astronomically accurate solid gold hats of the Neolithic,
Of the cairns and tombstones of the quiet places, of the attentive wariness of those without voice…….

the image is from an Iron Age Celtic coin that seems to show a storm or mountain deity

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MAGATAMA RETURNS

Tight arc
Hard as stone
Open eye.

Rigid curl
Weighed tight
Pulsing.

Foetal curl
Settled
Pulsing.

What is it?
What is it not?
Magatama.

Worn smooth
Rubbed
Inward.

Container
Contained
Key.

One skin
Rubbed smooth
Inner, outer.

Stretching
Taking form
Throbbing.

Rising head
Looking
Seeing.

Eagle beak
Bear claw
Worn smooth.

Incontrovertible proof
A previous universe
Magatama.

Worn away
All that remains:
First universe.

Hooked,
Held,
Harvested.

Hollow seed
Throwing curved edges,
Expansion.

Hollow centre
Regarding flow
Back to nothing.

Becoming precious
Passed down:
What remains.

Accumulating
One surface:
Time-space.

Oldest unknown
First limit
Convolution.

—-


Every now and then, the magatama awakes, whispers into half-sleep. It is a strange being, a shape so simple, so involuted. A seed, a genetic meme. Casting around, I wondered if there were other antediluvian icons that would stir that ancestral well so surely. So far, the closest approach is by the Celtic torc. Like the magatama to the first Japanese peoples, the torc epitomised what to be a Celt meant. A real, tangible object, an object of trade, of status, of power. I shall have to listen to their whispers also……

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