Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, cold morning, dawn, landscape, landscape photography, mist, mountains, nature, Poetry, Wales, Winter on December 31, 2016| 14 Comments »
Ice Breath
Is it not true
That it is always the past
We burn to keep ourselves warm?
The young sun
Is on the tops now,
The deep valleys shadowed,
The mists let go, rise and melt away.
One slow hawk
Skims the treetops.
The cold, still sky
Has yet to choose its colour.
Ice will soon breathe,
relax to water,
Struck by the
warm weight
of light.
Those
that have survived
the night
Will stir
and sing.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, awareness, belonging, connection, darkness, existence, landscape photography, night, Poetry, presence, world on December 29, 2016| 2 Comments »
The Blossoming Magnitude
I step out.
Thick darkness
And above night fog.
A few stars come and go.
This world
We cannot ever leave.
Every inch of us
Reeled out from its heart.
Made to stretch
And grow and fade
Between each breath
And each stillness,
Between each moment
Of presence and absence.
The world pushes through.
Wherever we might go
This world, too, shall come.
We are seamless
And utterly loved.
A fragment only
In strange fragmented minds
That do not realise the utter silence
Contains the voices of all.
The utter silence that answers us
Is the blossoming magnitude
Of the simple ground.
A round flicker of star,
Tasted, acknowledged, named.
Never are we severed,
Never lost, nor alone,
Though the angry, hungry tide
Of voices may say it.
Our science is love
And our gravity, delight.
Obedient to our breath,
We come and go,
Remembering how it all goes.
A bowl of sky.
A bowl of earth.
Enough food there is
For all things.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Abergwesyn, art, landscape, landscape photography, Mid Wales, Poetry, rivers on December 17, 2016| 1 Comment »
The long song
1
Pwll Bo, where the waters swirl the colour of trout,
As brown as deep sunlight and the taste of peat.
Shadowed is the heathered hue ( whose voice
White as lightning sings to the oldest of things,
Though few may know it except the ghosts
Of wanderers lost and found by starlight,
And the fastness of owl-bright silence
And the stillness of hills in their watchfulness.)
Pwll Bo and then the Washpool and then on,
Down to the church and then the town.
Everything murmurs in its own language.
The river’s accent rushes from wild to soothing
To wild again.
Clouded, the eye of this precinct night
Lost in dream that seems to be remembrance, but is not.
A doppler drift of slow, utterly endless forgetting.
2
Singing the long song
Pwll Bo roars white and whispers.
Water turning hills to soil.
3
Pwll Bo
Spirit song
Mountains to soil
Sunlight to trees
Water to life.
Weaving sound
A throat of rock.
White, roaring water.
Hollowed rock
A mouth of song.
Thunder whispers.
Sunlight and shade.
A rivered voice.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged annwfn, archetypes, art, daemons, debris, dreams, Earth Mind, Ideal, landscape photography, mind, Otherworld, Poetry, recycling, Secret Commonwealth, sentience, waste products on December 5, 2016| Leave a Comment »
White with snow are the hills on the horizon.
The rivers are quiet, the pools frozen.
Clouds from the north taste bitter cold sunrise.
The deep, dark, breathing earth accumulates to itself,
As if the threads and shreds of shared sentience
Net down the long years and become soaked
With drip and ceaseless dream, each wish and ache
And spark of memorable brightness,
Catalogued, compacted, savoured, saved.
And with these do they clothe themselves: in a world’s memories
And thus, learn to speak in howls and long whispers,
An aesthetic without emotion, a dance only, a game, a chess board,
A gwyllbwyll, a ritual that is not quite imitation nor mirroring
But has its own exquisite golden reason,
A long dreaming sublimation of spent and careless thought.
All these cobwebs and leaves, they are truly
the only gold to be cherished.
The damp and fusty decay of life thrown off,
Carefully considered and gathered again for feasts of kings and angels
And dark giant forms that have no concern for any future,
but nurture the past cradled in deeper woods, rocked in song,
Draped in arcane languages, swung on sunless, starless seas,
Shattered on mirrored starry pools and fountains.
A moment too slow for this world’s water
( a dream of even clearer water, a blood clear river,
a serpent spiral of cool life,
Silver water, perfect loom of water,
eternal life giver, rock cooled, cave silent,
Tremulous with distant footfalls, distant light.)
More real than the real, more real than time,
more present so it is squeezed between each chink
Of time and space, our substratum, our mother matter,
our folded vast and black pinions,
Our beautiful storm, our glory and tragedy,
our mulch of words.
To where all words sink and their images too,
to reform, re-loved beautiful monsters, free from doubt,
Unburdened of guilt, violent and innocent,
purely, demurely selfish and sharing the virtues of edge and shadow.
Ploughed deep in the dark trenches,
the midnight river boat of sun and moon,
sung with choir of gods and stars and lascivious,
long limbed goddesses born for pleasure.
They will swallow us all, open up and consume,
become fecund and full and birth us over and over,
their lovers named and unnamed, loved and laid to rest.
The smallest of things, a feast of passion most holy.
Most holy the earth and its names,
most holy the mystery beneath us,
the mirror within us, the eyes, the feral eyes,
the hungry eyes that look back
and do not ever, ever, look away.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged and such-like dreary leaden thoughts, art, emotion, endings, existence, landscspe photography, mystery, night, Poetry, sorrow, war, Winter on November 29, 2016| 2 Comments »
—
Soulless
To come out from the sorrow with wings
(The wind rising deepening thick darkness)
To find song that sings continuance
(The rain flown miles burns cold)
To find a haven, a hammocked clarity
(No stars, nor shadow, nor moon tonight)
The long roads aching empty, dreary, full of tears
(Lightless, limp, dreams splintered, knowing not the way to try)
Over the hills, bleak white drift forces itself into crevice and bank.
A slow, tempered piano hangs notes and melody, not new, nor remembered.
It echoes so and brings some small pillow of ease.
Firelight flickers,
All sink sleepless into dream.
A small thing it is to fail,
to cease, to become unmattered.
(The street empty, the empty house,
The mind revolving. The heart of things,
A sudden distance).
—-
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, bards, landscape, landscape photography, Poetry, tradition, Wales on November 19, 2016| 2 Comments »
Hills behind
There are hills behind the hills,
Words behind the words.
Clouds of understanding billow up
Then dissolve to fog.
The old words, the mountain words,
The river words –
No matter how fast you move,
You can never catch up with them.
The old words,
They have the deepest roots.
We sit by the forest edge,
Sky and grasses and the sallow dell.
Starlings shift and rise
From field to field.
Their patterns weave small tongues,
Bright eyes.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Bran and Branwen, continuity, Mabinogion, myth, Poetry, Second Branch, Welsh mythology on November 16, 2016| 3 Comments »
BRANWEN SINKS DOWN
Peeling away from this world
No longer glued by its bold certainties.
On a bare, high rock, above the sea,
The voices of wheeling gulls
Make more sense and better songs.
All the gods shrunk again
To caracature and silhouette.
Bawds and predators in golden ships
Sail across the shining sea
Offering friendship and support.
Business opportunities, so they say.
But there is nothing in their pipelines
But death and drought and bones.
A multitude, dreaming dreary dreams
Not their own,
A calcifying inculcation calculated
And considered,
A drip-feed of paralysis and boredom.
Our men of skill are liars
And gloaters over trashy baubles
Transfixed by the mutilation of time.
And so she will sink again
Into the green mounded ground
(White wings folded over her head),
Not wishing more desolation to be hers,
Not wishing to remember anything
But the oldest songs still drumming deep,
A heartbeat under everything,
Hidden roads, perhaps forever safe.
And so she will dream on wide wings,
Back and forth over wide seas, breathing,
Breathing, whispering messages,
Carrying messages, a quivering web.
Pushing down deeper,
The dreams will always, always,
become more real.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged annwfn, art, Autumn, bardic, deep ecology, druidic metaphor, First Branch, landscape photography, Mabinogion, Otherworld, Poetry, Pwyll and Arawn, samhain, symbiosis, Welsh myth on November 1, 2016| 2 Comments »
Samhain in Annwfn
Transgression by assumption.
You have taken what does not belong
By assuming everything you see here
Is yours by right.
Taking what is mine
You shall take my role and duty.
You shall by this become completely me
(And yet not), and I you.
Enter the deep and see perfection
And its flows.
Twilight woven through with gold.
A brocade worn thin and transparent,
Sky-patched, redolent.
A more perfect dream
Sunk into the depths.
As if eyes had been staring at the sun:
Now everything veined red-gold,
Too dark and too bright to see,
An inner burning light that dims the world,
Makes sense of flickers and ghosts,
And tongues of fiery liquid language
Scarce understood but lascivious.
Skin turned fallen leaf, crunched,
Made liquid, sucked up,
A new wine burning with blushed passion
Or so it may seem.
The skill here
Is not to weigh nor judge
But to lick the lightest air and breeze
And swim undisturbed, unseen
According to most fluid laws.
Dreamed but not dreaming,
A metaphor eternal, echoing.
There is, and never was, a thing made single,
Nor one made so especial
It could not be reflected endlessly
In midnight pools.
And all this
Only a beginning.
A recalibration.
A falling leaf
Slowly spinning.
A kiss.
A message.
It will be dust in the morning.
But the ache of memory:
That will be the always hidden gold.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Bardic rant, Connla's Well, death of goodness, Irish myth, landscape photography, music, petrochemical, Poetry, poison, pollution, radioactive waste, rational madness on October 28, 2016| 1 Comment »
connla’s well
to bend and break the smallest thing.
to lust for endless yes and no,
an absolute reckoning, soul shredded,
monotheistic, the lie of ultimate truth.
bright and rainbow bright
are the poisoned slicks of connla’s well.
persistent petrochemical degeneration,
a vitriol squirming to return to peace,
to a simple organic hush,
the breathless pall of surcease.
dark and bodiless in perfection,
a simple voice unquestioned,
a greasy fire emitted,
the burning of all things
superstitious or holy.
and deeper yet: a spark not found in stars
acidic and relentless, demonically proud,
an unholy perfection eternal.
anathema, contrary to all things,
a mistake unretrievable,
adhering to all beauty
with a most perfect destroying jealousy.
these things do the foolish wise bring forth.
these days and nights of eloquence do they refuse.
these they will rue, though still persue the poison of power.
they will become the unnamed, the cursed, the wretched,
though yet will they delve and dive deeper into death
and deeper yet, lost and seething, dissolving, rotting,
ruining all, ruining all.
—
Though ‘irretrievable’ is correct, i prefer ‘unretrievable’, seeming to sound more final.
simonhlilly 
Conversations: Invisible Friends at a Year’s Ending
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, asides, comment, commentary, friends, gold leaf, ideas, inspiration, Poetry, Ryokan's Mind Moon Circle, wall relief, wood relief carving on December 26, 2016| 2 Comments »
this dreaming breath
named from a confluence
long streams tumbled for a while
on the meticulous dance of sun and moon
clothed in scars and mystery, veiled, draped about.
shaped by a host, a singing constellation of unnamed stars.
—
Having been in the woods
One may never come out.
Though scrupulous,
A whisper breath will still
remain, like the memory
Of mulch in the nostril,
The coolness of the skin,
The crack of twig, a cobwed brush.
We become inhabited-
The same as we ghost
Forgotten places.
Murmur.
Reverie interupted.
—
Leonard
This poet’s voice.
Like honey,
Like an earthquake.
A gentle mountain
With thunder.
Sun and rain,
we smile, we cry.
All vistors
With return tickets.
—
Heart’s warmth, the only sustaining fire.
We are huddled beings, backs to the night,
glorious in our strangeness, bred for our dreams.
Peculiar are the haunted songs echoing,
peculiar the views we insist upon, peculiar the words,
peculiar the moments.
revivified by the lightest touch,
ignited by the slightest breath,
flowered and flowering,
the thinnest web of cells strung together,
pushing outwards,
holding back,
translating silence.
—
This one breath
Is ours.
Then than
Too,
Is gone.
This stream
Of word
Caught in a
Flashlight
Moment
Then
Lost.
Remembering
What is
No longer.
A wonder!
—
Her shell-like,
Bending low to this little earth.
She will turn away
In sorrow and disbelief
Fall and fade
And become dark
And empty
Once more.
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