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.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Llanfechan, photography, Poetry, time, transformation, Wales, yew trees on April 5, 2017| 2 Comments »
1
Go down, come down
Through the hollow heart,
The yew of Llanfechan
Peeled away, the long
Sunlight moment
Mesmeric, the voice
Of voices whispered
On green tongues, long
And longing, and full
Of tragedy.
Enclosed, but
Wearing thin,
Boundary still between
Worlds, the boundary
Between times,
Given up to earth,
Food for the
Little things.
That is what the mighty
Always are.
The upright fading away.
Let me bow down,
Bow down to earth
And mulch,
Forgotten in lost
Corners, lost
On a tangent,
The slant of
Trajectories
Towards
The same
Centre.
2
This heart,
A bowl of dust.
These hollowed hills
Scooped out, abraded
By flocked moments,
Voracious, universal.
This pulse, this canopy, this swan,
Arced and spread-winged,
Reflected, shattering rainbows,
A quiver-full of light
And a mumble of story.
We no longer swing the verses,
Though the chorus is our breath itself,
Self-generated, a blueprint, a prayer.
Curtained in cloud and light, the valley floor,
Unfamiliar at this height, all becomes
Mysterious and fading.
The old tree, clasped in itself
Knotted with hymns it knew
Before brick and stone.
Its own Last Trump, its own
Resurrection, the woman in the sun,
Seven bowls and seven seals,
A thundering voice ‘How much longer
Shall we suffer in hunger? How much
Longer shall we suffer in thirst?’
To change shape and, invisible,
To infiltrate the insignificant.
A sermon on patience
And darkness.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, changing light, dawn, landscape, light, Mid Wales, photography, Poetry, skies, spring, Wales on March 17, 2017| 2 Comments »
TRANSIENT 5
A day of slow skies
Testing new brightnesses.
Cwm Dwfnant is lost
In dreams of cloud once more.
In the green centre
The river whispers
And the crows feel that
Spring is near now, over the hills,
And sunlight, too,
In the slate and stately rise and exhale.
A sleeping world,
Dreaming of waking,
Dreaming of a small unfolding.
—
TRANSIENT 6
Tinder, the horizon.
Laid just so
With blue on blue
To catch spark and roar
Come sunrise.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, dawn, landscape photography, light, Poetry, spring, Wales on March 12, 2017| 2 Comments »
Transient (4)
Skies of palest violet,
An uninhabited eye
Whose souls are words.
An unimaginable wind
Blows light in waves
across the hills.
Like heaven,
the snowfields rise above,
Hardly visible, their glimmering.
A village of daffodils sways.
The jackdaws freefall in joy.
There is ice in the buckets
And all the farms roar with fires
For the lads and lasses hunched
With cold hands
From a long night’s lambing.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, landscape photography, light, Poetry on March 10, 2017| Leave a Comment »
TRANSIENT 3
The light that paces
The valley floor
Graces hearts with
Its bright and stately shade,
Reminds the soul
It ever ends and begins again,
That nothing, not one breath,
Remains more
Than one
Scintillating motion.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged a certain Welsh Dylan, art, landscape photography, Poetry, Wales on March 7, 2017| Leave a Comment »
The words
of the sea
Roaring drunk
And glorious
in endless sunlight.
He has squeezed through
regardless,
Touching the soon
And the many.
He knows that
Poetry is
not the words.
Words
are what remains
When poetry has flown.
Flown like a bomb,
like a sunrise,
In all directions,
too great for human kind,
But not the soul,
singing, silent, watching
In endless birth,
the reason beyond itself.
—
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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