Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Autumn, consciousness, landscape, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Poetry on December 5, 2019| Leave a Comment »
RESTLESS
This mountain sails through its weather
just as it moves through the centuries.
Magnanimous, it shelters all under its shadow.
Infinitely patient, it welcomes all,
Folding their tired dust into that long gaze.
The mountain, settled in its own weight
Breathes whispering streams and roots.
In the garden a robin sings in light rain.
The autumn winds curl the edges of leaves.
Dogs bark, uneasy from their white walled farms.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, choirs, hymns, John Price ‘Beulah’, landscape photography, music, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Poetry, Wales on November 14, 2019| Leave a Comment »
JOHN PRICE ‘BEULAH’
Between heaven and earth
John Price, there, was a blackbird before rain,
a song thrush in the evening.
He kept to small lanes
and taught others his delight
at the end of a hard day.
Carpenter, son of a carpenter,
between the rolling roads and rising views,
between Llangammarch and Beulah,
he measured with a clear eye
the mortice and tenon of his rhymes,
turning the tune, tapping home the notes.
His voice heard mellifluous
by the hills and rivers,
by the gathered singing poor,
by maid and shepherd,
by schoolchildren and labourers.
To sing in chains
is to watch the chains
dissolve.
—
John Price ‘Beulah’ was born in Llangammarch. He learned his music from a couple of skilled local music teachers, particularly the ‘sol fa’ systems of notating music. Apart from a couple of years in America, where quite a lot of his music was published, he spent his life as an estate carpenter, teaching music and local choirs around the Irfon valley in his spare time. He was a prolific and influential hymn writer in the early 20th century, and also wrote many popular songs. His work did much to promote local choirs, so central to the characher of Welsh rural life.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Autumn, Cambrian Mountains, landscape, landscape photography, larches, Poetry, seasons, Wales on November 11, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Larches
The way colours remain long into the grey autumn.
The way the hanging cones resemble syllables
Lingering on the tongue’s tip,
Or kanji haiku brushed carefully careless.
The way these larches let go and dance
On pale cooling hills.
The way images blur and smudge but remain themselves:
Brushstrokes of careless, magnified light.
An autumn aesthetic: nostalgic patterns floating.
Delicacy and decay: look close and the world
Disappears into light.
—
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.
—
