Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, heat, July, landscape photography, Poetry, summer, Wales on July 7, 2017| 3 Comments »
JULY NOW
July now, and high summer days lay upon us.
In hedgerows the field maples smoulder a new red.
All the greens, more tentative now, tinted with heat and dust,
Weighed down by a glowing heavy sun.
The rivers are low and silent, bleached rocks butter-smooth.
Merciless will be the shadeless hills, growing pale and dry.
We seek the cooler air of woodlands
And walk out at evening with lullaby thought.
The nodding grasses, ripe and swaying,
And a full moon, crisp in a blameless sky.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ambience, art, Beulah, green, june, landscape photography, light, midsummer, Poetry, silence, twilight, Wales, woods on June 27, 2017| Leave a Comment »
MIDSUMMER LIGHT
The woods are settled now and full.
Their heavy green skirts spread cool
And pleated in each valley’s green lap.
Nest and nested, crowned with shade,
They glow of a midsummer evening
Into a slow, white bow of twilight
Patterned with bats and owls,
A stretched and quiet expanse,
The tropic and declination of invisible motion,
A singular silvered attendance upon silence.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, landscape, landscape photography, Poetry, rain, summer, Wales on June 12, 2017| Leave a Comment »
SPITE INN
June settles in,
Warm and fine and easy.
Beyond Spite Inn
Clouds roll through the wet grasses.
Two cuckoos praise each other
Across the oak valley floor.
The old roads drip green.
—
Spite Inn is a ruined, but preserved, building on the road between Tirabad and Cyngordy on the northern slopes of the Eppynt. It is likely a drover’s resting place, and its name is thought to derive from its rivalry with another nearby inn.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Abergwesyn, art, june, landscape, mist, photography, Poetry, rain, Wales on June 8, 2017| 2 Comments »
JUNE DRIFT
I am as blurred as the cleft of Cwm Dwfnant shrugged with cloud,
shunned in its darkness, up hanging from the heights, silent as a hawk.
like ladders the thistles grow, straight and high, and the sedges hustle
the grasses, cropped short, and rain-laden.
the woods, a hushed audience, wait for rain
that is as welcome as the sun, as welcome as the long, pale dawns,
as welcome as the naked starlit evenings.
sallow seed slides and drifts, amnesiac angels, bounced on warm air,
and shallow cool down by the gurgling river’s bank.
and the globeflowers at Nant Y Bran bursting and butter-bright as suns
on their long green necks. and yet they still cannot look into tomorrow.
where shall be ever planted the sweet heads of valerian
and the meadowsweet foaming up through the coming of another summer.
light drizzle rains down, slowly drifting east. a cuckoo mist, a cuckoo silence.
I am blurred as the sources of all rivers are, nominal, approximate.
this white drift is a moment that now dissolves the hills
and clarifies by shimmer and shade the valley’s deep and every fold.
the unknown and the known are not new dreams to us.
they clothe us and wrap us round, swaddled and held still, a long lullaby,
sometimes with words, sometimes with sounds,
sometimes with a warm breath
that is itself no different than love.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, landscape, landscape photography, May, mist, nature, Poetry, rain, Wales on June 5, 2017| 3 Comments »
These blurred, cool days are best,
Soaked with fresh green airs
Hedgerows smudged with bluebells,
Cowslip clouds lolling heavy in the grass
And the rivers running brown and full
Over hollows and heaped grey rock.
And everywhere the blackbirds sing
On wooded slopes,
And the flit and flick of swallows
In the slow rain.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Dinas, existence, landscape, landscape photography, Poetry, Wales on May 30, 2017| 1 Comment »
We are only a dream here to dream.
An exhalation of hill and forest.
A fancy of slab rock and weeds.
A drift of fog taken shape then dissipated.
Hardly even a thing, hardly a name.
A point of reference to a moment, green and eternal.
This field of dream, this song thrush stilled,
This fall of light rain, this cool dissolution,
This river breath.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, attention, clarity, continuance, deep mind, Gywn ap Nydd, inspiration, landscape, landscape photography, memory, mind, mist, phiotography, Poetry, the Wild Hunt, thought on May 15, 2017| 3 Comments »
CONJURATION
He sits by the window letting the landscape go.
A little incense will stretch and curl in the moving airs.
There is welcome rain on pale, misted hills:
The meadows and their trees will green.
The shoals will flicker beneath thin surfaces,
And there is skill in waiting and skill in catching up the glimmer.
Sometimes it is enough to hold one wriggling thing.
Sometimes a light touch will tease a line,
A bright twist into this world, a hopeful humming reel.
There is the holding and the letting go.
A whisper wish to Gwyn ap Nydd
Who hunts these lost ghosts and churns them upwards.
To mark a path only, or to push down into it,
Or to be pulled willynilly in mad rush and see,
See where it leads, traipsing forgetful, curious.
Or but to float above serene and light as hawk bones,
To not become distracted by maybes,
To contain all, to exclude nothing, to lose track of no slither,
To allow a subtle sedimentation – to be that patient,
To become equanimity, geological.
It will be the touch of madness that marks it out,
The touch of madness they shall not forget.
The discomfort of impossible resurrection:
Light that is not there, a bubbling up of echoed sounds,
A mystery of conjured voices, a song of ghosts.
This, the slow and certain engraving of our vanishing lives
Upon your smoothed and cooling brows; etched, hatched and nested within
Your twigged and tumbledown minds.
A thimble of the past to dull each ache of uncertain stitch.
That impossible race to reach each sunsetting horizon.
Between the moment and the madness
Is where the bright shoals swim.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, cuckoo, deceit, elections, landscspe, Poetry, poison, politics, spring on April 27, 2017| 2 Comments »
ELECTION
Cloud is low, a light rain.
The rivers will rise, and the cuckoo’s voice.
These is no road to happiness.
Sit still a while. It is here.
In cities sprout the sudden
Intricacies of deceit:
New plans of action;
Words dressed, eloborate dances.
Fear cultivated as if it were virtue.
Hypnotic screens drip poison:
Connla’s Well on every tongue.
We rear the monsters of others.
The monsters of our own,
We have not recognised.
Shucked out and flailing,
Naked goodness pecked by crows,
Growing cold as the summer
Warms the wooded hills.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, darkness, expanse, Kit watkins, light, music, Poetry, threshold on April 14, 2017| 6 Comments »
MUSIC FOR THE END
I shall not go into tomorrow
( though I may dream there).
These poems poised to begin again.
Our music, the only thing to give us birth.
What the endless aeons of starlight have waited for.
At this river’s edge – the taste of tears and flowers.
I shall dream tonight the distance –
Roaring waterfalls in Yolmo,
And the pearl liquid silent waters:
Loch Craignish after rain.
Do what we may, it will never be enough.
We paint the day and start again.
The gods have cursed us with their beautiful weaknesses.
With poetry that will not stay,
With friends and with loves
And with endings.
simonhlilly 
Marginalia
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, art, comments, Dinas, fragments, human endeavour, landscape photography, May morning, Mid Wales, mind, openness, Poetry, spring, striving on May 24, 2017| 1 Comment »
MARGINALIA
below this turbulence:
slow, vast, are the currents.
Knotted threads soften, unwind
(As morning mists
In curling, upward sun).
The ghosts we hold most dear,
Those haunted voices we always hear,
That diffuse the endless night-
They come and go
As if they owned the place,
As if they mattered more.
They are so tiring,
These endless stumblings
Proudly towards truth,
Where simple goodness would suffice.
The broken-nailed, mad eyed dreamers,
The demon-fed preachers.
For we tumble towards a close,
And that is always and only certain.
Here, is the benign patience of Spring
Come again to remind us
That warmth will split the hawthorn blossom
(And the hills already drunk and hazy on it).
Just one sunny day,
and all we dream of
is summer.
A slow dance of swallows,
lambs and birdsong,
One blue warm billowy morning in May,
enough to banish all the long months
Of winter, to open and relax,
To build a nest
As if it were forever.
—
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