Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Haiku, Haiku-ish, heat, landscape, landscape photography, light, nature, Poetry, river, summer, Wales, water on October 13, 2019| 3 Comments »
SUMMER RIVER
Golden edged
Summer river
Rocks cooling their toes.
—
Golden river
Summer gnats
All diminuendo
–
Cooling their old bones
Grey worn rocks in summer heat
Squatting in midstream
–
Soft summer rivers
Water folding up sunlight
Shoals of darting fish
–
High summer
We see them gather
To cool their feet:
These venerable rocks
–
Dreaming in the slow waters
Time flows silent
By the river side
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, deep ecology, hills, landscape, landscape photography, language, metaphysics, mystery, Poetry, transcendence, vision, Wales on September 25, 2019| 4 Comments »
A DANCE UPON Y GARN
The bones of the hills
The bones of rivers
The bones of the mist
The bones of meaning.
How shall we talk to the bones
Of things, the sweet marrow?
That great grey slope,
A rising falling sine wave,
A rumbling note bending horizons.
Converse with it dressed thus in cloud
And become a stranger removed from illusion.
Untied, drifting, anchored only to words
And a dance that is so so slow, it brings worlds to their end
And changes them that new languages are needed
To begin to know it, to begin to know it.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, death, landscape, landscape photography, Mid Wales, mortality, peace, Poetry, the dead, Wales on September 15, 2019| Leave a Comment »
LEAVING LLANGAMMARCH
Who would choose to leave this Llangammarch
Wrapped in birdsong on a warm and sunny morning?
Who would lift their eyes from the glistening waters
Draped with alder shade and grasses?
Throughout the houses it has now the soft hush of loss.
The hollowness of a hollowed name, a rehearsal of memories.
Llangammarch threaded between wood and waters;
An easy confluence neat folded against the green grey heights
of Epynt and its sighing skies, its distances tasting of blue.
Except those who tend the dead ( the small things singing), no one lives on Epynt now.
It is a roofless, empty house, shadowless, and singing winds.
Perhaps it is there our departed go, congregating to watch the unfolding world,
At ease and in peace, soothed by a longer perspective on sorrow and joy.
Who would leave Llangammarch, warm and dreaming?
Those with dreams urgent and golden;
Following the light upstream,
the open skies, the warm winds,
the curlew berating heaven.
A floating world, a breath away.
One breath away.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, bardic stuff, coexistence, landscape, Mannanan, metaphysical cosmology, Otherworld, paradox, Poetry, symbiosis, Welsh myth on September 4, 2019| 5 Comments »
SHINING WORLD
(MANANNAN’S ISLE)
Glass-smooth the sea,
Its light a silk knife
Whispering sighed names:
The hidden islands.
Bathed in rainbow words,
There and not there,
Not to be focused upon.
To be rolled upon the tongue,
Tasted and weighed,
Melted to a honey meaning.
Sung in fickle keys
Near impossible to memorise.
A world away, here between breaths.
Suffers none to name it
Nor clothe it in anything
Other than it is.
Unknown by knowing,
Reached by rudderless boat
Through mist to sunlit sands.
Their mouths say one thing,
Their eyes another,
Their hands dance around,
Gestures in hypnotic weave.
Hope is not there,
Nor is it elsewhere.
Those who want shall
Never be satisfied.
To remember perfectly
And to forget perfectly,
And to continue, nonetheless.
That is how to belong there.
From the lands of eternal dreaming
We seem here to vanish continually,
Swept away,
The tides of joy and pain,
Doomed and mortal.
But without time
What can be done?
The perfected go nowhere,
Nothing accomplished.
Sun and moon and stars hold still,
All roads vanish in the mists.
Wordless songs.
We dream of them,
They dream us,
The in and out of breath.
A golden chain,
Link needing link.
We must dance together.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Dinbych yr Pysgod, landscape, photography, Poetry, seaside, sun, Tenby, tides, Wales, weekend break on May 21, 2019| 1 Comment »
—
Two nights by the sea
Matching our breathing to the slow waves.
Hardly a cloud to darken the waters
From this smiling turquoise.
A half moon nudges the tides
Wearing footsteps away, the miles of sand.
Thoughts drift to the one horizon,
But do not ever wander far.
We meander around the old town walls
And back and forth,
Like painters touching a near complete canvas,
Almost perfectly satisfied.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, awen, bardish utterance, black and white photography, definition, expression, generation, motivation, mystery, Poetry, the Sublime on March 13, 2019| 3 Comments »
WHAT IT SHOULD BE
Does it, (pay attention,) does it,
Even when become a stream continuous and downward,
Does it lope back to steady prose, pedantic, precise, nonedescript ?
Or else might it wend songly and weirdly woven
Painted true but in madman’s colours, seen from mirror’s view,
Haunted, glanced at the corner of the eye,
Dancing words, rolled, roiling words,
Words that spurt fountains unbidden but shaped from
The lips of stone gods.
We are all here short moments in the moment of time
Gliding darkest matter on pools of spinning light.
We are voiceless until breath finds shape.
Voiceless until we sing sprouted feelings.
The heart, it is not a steady thing.
It is a giddy thing, a butterfly, birdsong thing,
A river thing losing itself babbling wilder gestures.
That it makes no sense, that it fills itself to bursting,
That it runs hands full and scattering meanings,
That it reaches and fails and reaches and finds something else,
That it is not music, that is is not is not music,
A tamping scuffling rhythm in dust, a dance becoming,
A mouth dance, a tongue drum, a skirl, a pibroch, a lament,
An imitation of storms in the mountains,
An imitation of the mist cleared by slow spreading sunlight
An imitation of the meld, the mix, the utterance, the name.
A dipping down to the roots of water, to the mud, to the squirming.
Entangled. Neither one this, nor the other, that.
Turning inside out to find to find what brings it all together.
What enables utter forgetfulness of edges, renames the names.
It is what prayer should be, what gods recognise as their own spark,
Generation unto generation, world without end.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, cold, darkness, landscape photography, Poetry, snow, stars, stillness, Wales, Winter on February 4, 2019| 1 Comment »
snow night now
Snow now, falling without degrees, silent as night is.
I shall become night, standing still here,
Starfilled and let go of all, dying slowly,
Imperceptibly cooler, waiting small sounds
and sight to clear, the shapes of other’s thoughts
Falling white and falling white
To settle without degrees and blameless.
The words tumble, some mine, some from elsewhere,
Which is which and why distinguish?
The small noises of the night
In snowfall and starlit dark.
The stars, nothing more patient
Nor sorrowful, watching it all blink
And change, blink and vanish,
Blink and sleep.
World’s bones grow cold
So far from fires
So far from fires.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aeons, altered landscape, ancestors, annwfn, art, art photography, layers, past, perspective, Poetry, progenitors, sequences, stratigraphies, time dwelling on February 1, 2019| 3 Comments »
LAND MASS
It goes deeper, deeper than the flowering Cymru
Fighting like cockerels, fighting like stallions,
Shaping its gold, sharpening its iron,
Burying their wise in wells and living for eternity.
It goes deeper, deeper than the careful hunters
Moulding bone and wood, sure- handed, closed-lipped,
With measuring eyes, with sparkling eyes,
Fire- gathered and moving on, moving on.
It goes deeper, deeper than the bear-must caves
And the guardian watchers over the far plains,
Dried and herd-filled and spun with the sky-filled mysteries,
The wheeling light, the earth, the sky, the roads between.
It goes deeper, deeper than this. Delved, rooted out,
Held firm, a fountain of birdsong, an endless forest
And the glimmer of scents woven, woven.
Warm blood and racing hearts offered, shared, changing shape.
It goes deeper, deeper than sound to those silences of aquamarine,
Not rock nor liquid but the grinding of time on time
Scraping the bowl of the land by slow scraped degrees,
A return to the simplest and the sheltered nests of first things
Miles below groaning ice, dreaming of procreation
The passing on of breath to breath, an exhalation of word.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, awareness, bodiless, cloud, Freedom, light, Poetry, spirit on January 18, 2019| Leave a Comment »
LUMINOUS
Luminous ghosts
in translucent
birdsong mornings.
Old friends
invisible
and dancing.
We will have forgotten everything,
( memory
being the engine
of eternal
destruction).
Magnanimous
in all things,
Utterly laughing,
missing nothing.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, landscape photography, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, near Solstice, Poetry, Wales, wind and rain, winter day on December 20, 2018| 4 Comments »
COLD LAKE DAY
Rust red are the fingertips
Of the dead, scraping at the edges
Of the day. They shall seek to admit
Just a little more light, a little more
Where the hills hesitate then vanish
(They are remembering the very
Oldest of names, hollowed as tombs,
Frost-bright, distant).
In storm wind
Trees and crows sing dancing. Endless
Fields the sheep wait patiently,
Wait patiently turned away from rain.
It is a hard day hung upon
The crosstide of the seasons.
Brief and battered, a smudged world
The colour of old dried blood and bruises,
The colour of steel and verdigris,
Of sodden soil and seed slumber.
A wind ripped thing pinched with rain.
Sorrow is a cold lake in the mountains,
A grey heron waiting to feed.
Joy is a cold lake in the mountains,
A grey heron waiting to feed.
—
simonhlilly 