Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ambience, art, haymaking, landscape, landscape photography, nature, photography, Poetry, skies, summer, Wales on July 22, 2015| 6 Comments »
Under a silent sky
Stretched with cloud,
Grasses loll green and pink and grey.
A firmament of birdsong
Curled, woven to sift shading green.
Tractors sigh and roar down the lanes.
Fields turned now and mown.
Stay quiet, stay still a while,
Hear how the river mumbles.
Fed we are,
Appeased by the width of things:
The deep caverned wood,
The slow, fine rains,
Flowers, now, of cloud.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, atmospheres, being, black and white, cloud, evolution, ink and print, light, lightness, metaphysics, mist, photography, Poetry, stratospheres, thought, transcendence, vapour on July 20, 2015| 2 Comments »
THE VAPOURS OF HEAVEN
Shall they stray far,
These wandered thoughts,
Drenched with the vapours of heaven?
Shall they, distilled, sublimate,
Take new form, grow winged
Then smiling, dissolve?
Shall they, folded,
Nest upon timeless light.
Sleep, and wake golden,
Luminous, singing?
Shall they, without surcease,
Dance eternal energies,
Still named, at home
On vast, breathing cascades
Of space?
Shall they, (these thoughts),
Turn swallows, spin as swifts,
Light as thistledown, rise
Like willowherb, weightless,
A drift in summer,
A slow gentle breeze
Bird-filled?
Shall they stretch, sprout nerves,
Become sensible, grow good souls
With new names, find mouths
And lips and tongue
And sing their own song?
The vapours of heaven:
A saffron casket, rainbow-locked.
Small whispered bells,
Honey-lipped bees.
A sky stretched
To blue transparency.
A tent with purpose,
An unseen sea,
Scaled skin of cloud.
In amongst and between,
Within cloud and moving mists,
Droplets suspended awaiting surface:
To acquire direction, to know gravity,
To locate tidal choirs.
It is all music, all music,
Nothing but song.
These images are taken from a series of ink drawings, scanned and photographically enlarged to reveal strange details. The revealing of other structures formed a parallel word stream imagining thought/word becoming sentient of themselves, hence the text, as one possible accompaniment to the images. (Other possibilities included star names or quotes from the works of John Dee). Some of the images are pixelating because of extreme enlargement, so these I may remake as pencil drawings…
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged alternate realities, angels, art, Edward Kelly, evolution, history, Jonn Dee, language, layers, metaphysics, mirrors, myth, photography, Poetry, reality on July 13, 2015| 4 Comments »
SCRY
1
Small things
From deep pools
We rise.
Vaporous things lifting,
Turning,
Weightless drifting.
A lick and dissolve,
Ice smoke, sighing, aimless
Rise, spin, twist and dissolve,
A white fade lift,
A tongue, forgetful, vague.
Without a mirror, you see,
We scatter.
2
The falling down of words
Like honey bees or like rain.
They shall patter and gather together.
They shall wash away all dust of death.
They shall be as mirrors
And as suns.
3
Johannes, named from a river
Forever flowing east,
Named from the delta of Aphrodite
And the Aegyptians,
Of perfect memory and skill mathematic.
A subtle blade, enough to wriggle between worlds,
Searching the point between brightness and darkness.
4
All the cities are dying.
Accursed, they spread limp
And rot from centre outwards.
We have purchased all, yet still hunger, empty.
5
The view mists, fogs over.
A spray of rain and rose petal.
Summon the spirits again, Edward.
Summon again the blast of visions.
I have learned the language of angels
And now they pester me
As flies in summer meadows.
The kings and queens of England
Process in elegant spite, shifty-eyed,
Blaming cousins and the fickleness of peasants.
6
Around the garden walls,
Drab sparrows squabbling,
Happy as morning.
In the hills again,
Lost in mists,
Tight-lipped hunters.
7
Those accustomed to gaze and gaze
Letting in the world unmasked, unaltered,
Though they disappear, remain behind each edge
Every line of silver,
Seared into time’s retina.
Like Padmasambhava’s cave,
Taking up his body’s shape,
A perfect void forever sitting,
Open mind, open heart, unclassified,
Uncategorised, a species beyond light,
A ripple cascading throne,
A point through stillness, through reflection,
Through mirrored glare.
The eyes that look back
At all eyes,
Time collapsed to a breath,
Space folded
To a golden nest,
A beer relished at evening.
8
The sacred,
Always a little smutty,
To these men of science.
A vermilion stone smeared with faith.
9
So slight is the edge that shines,
The mirror’s reflectant skin.
So small a thing to throw back vision,
To show what is and is not there.
Such a line between, ( if line there is),
Seen and unseen.
So fragile a mechanism
To construct comprehension.
We settle to a silver lie,
Satisfied with thin smiles.
10
The eyes may tear something new from light.
New stranger seeds, planted in sight,
Doubts of how deep and shallow
All this reflected life might be.
God buried deep in the liver of a fool.
The Devil buried deeper in his reason.
Rise and fall, a history of empires
In this one small breath.
The same elements congeal
In madmen and in stars.
Somewhere a sun shall rise
And we shall be young
And beautiful again.
11
They push through our bitter fictions,
A stain within vast humid dream.
Spirit filled are the worlds elsewhere
Engraving slowly, they take form line by line.
Removed are the curls of nascence
A ticking clock, a creak, a shadow.
12
It is not malevolent to desire survival,
To thrust through to bigger life.
We are pushed and torn apart
As natural as morning, an evolution of sorts.
Best not, then, weigh nor judge,
(All, after all, the mockery of self
And self-existence).
A fly lands and takes off,
A pest, a nuisance, slow in slow air,
But what if, what if.
13
Our prevalence, our striding
Incessant self-portraiture:
A mistake, a neurosis, surely.
A better view must prevail,
A breaking through of stronger stories,
Radiant gods with heads of eagles,
Sky gods with lightning hair.
Beyond a mirror’s glass
That thin veil allowing silvered vision,
Presumes a surface woven illusion.
So many haunted eyes,
14
The utter strangeness of it.
A timed lapse, a void, a flicker.
Dark matter, the deep fog,
A sunless pressure, trenched, ocean deep.
Black smokers blistering more strange life.
We become utterly replaced again.
15
A charming magus chants destruction
And parturition in one caught breath.
The wonder is we do not see
How small and fast, how struggled and unfree,
How lost and how imprecise,
How glorious and how wrong.
16
The wise remain silent,
Watching skies unutterably changed.
I cannot say with whose voice for sure,
Or whence or from when.
A slight recorder.
A wave front.
A gravity well.
A spinning top
Each second more slowly.
The grate of opening
And closing doors.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, extinction, futures, garden, Irfon Valley, landscape photography, lanscape, Poetry, rainxlouds, storm, summer morning, The Epynt, uncertain futures, Wales, wind rising on July 3, 2015| 9 Comments »
A ROAR OF SUMMER
Of what shall we sing
In the ringing silence,
In the hushed ocean forest,
In the crow morning?
These ghost words haunt
The sway and shift,
The weight or lightness of moments,
The scented full and falling roses.
How can, how shall, the shifting pulse,
The dark and light cloud,
Stray highly, voiced onwards?
The dead sigh, roaring in the winds,
Rasp in the trees.
Their songs push and spin this world,
(As we might hope to
For ears that strain in summer dawn,
For futures and reasons and signs
To hope for goodness and good dreams).
The limp honeysuckle, the weaving bee,
A masked eternal glowing.
To be shriven and rid of this
Wasteland drab, dulled down leaden.
A golden storm is coming.
Hush. Summer’s engine.
The smallest cloud
Is greater than all this.
The light rain from the hills
Shall send us deep sleep.
The dreaming ear
Catch, but not hold,
An answer.
We are not what we were,
Nor shall be.
A pall, lifted.
Edges blur in oncoming rain.
We shall become slaked,
Unquestionably whole,
Purely hollow,
Of lightness and vast,
Perhaps,perhaps.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, art, CERN, despair, history, oppression, palimpsest, Poetry, politics, power-mongers, repetition of events on June 22, 2015| 7 Comments »
A HARD RAIN
The one ring roars in the mountains
Cracking worlds in idle curiosity.
Nonchalent, malevolent, intelligent cities
Breed hungry ghosts who howl and tear and are never satisfied,
Though everything holy is in their grasp.
Silence floats naked and alone
As the dice shifts this way then that.
Helpless are those
Who have been taught right from wrong,
Helpless the nights in the face of relentless light.
For sixty years now the screen
Has flickered from prescience,
Restless souls doubting the wit of the future.
By increments the images breath and take life,
Jumping dreams, shadowing into being,
Sparks from each fire, windblown,
Begin to eat their own existence.
In this year
All mirrors became broken
Or smudged to smoke.
So enchanted, we could see
No longer what we had become.
In this year
A growl of wind
Scattered the minds of many,
Leaving them empty singing hymns
And rhymes from childhood.
In this year
The very bricks and stones
Of our homes became soaked in sorrow,
So it seeped into each shadow
And downcast each ray of light with dust.
Laden heavy, we shuffled about,
Having lost all will to sing
And all skill to speak eloquence.
In this year
A great plague of demons political
Infested the homes of the nation.
Whatever was tried, failed to oust them,
Until despair weighed heavy on the weak and helpless.
Cities rang hollow with empty eyes.
Rapacious beasts lived in the high windowed buildings,
Though few noticed the slowing of time
And the long shadowed echoes,
So dismayed were we by our long ignorances
And taken up with dreams of bright illusion.
Echo and Decay.The concept of the overlay of events and times, the repetition of events, same old stuff, images of decaying vegetation superimposed on extracts from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, which recorded each year’s major events in England from the sixth to the twelfth centuries, and Anglo-Saxon poetry. Not complete pieces but trials and try-outs.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, landscape, landscape photography, nature, Poetry, summer solstice on June 21, 2015| 2 Comments »
SUMMER LONG
This elder splashed world, this rippled bourne,
A thousand round cream horizons
Stretching to light’s limit.
Sunlit words scatter on green tongues,
A bee wind, rose-scented, wavers.
This land breathes its hills and hollows,
The folding and unfolding of Time.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged a memorable fancy, angels, art, deity, democracy, demon logic, drawing, palimpsest, Poetry, points of view, politics, printmaking on June 3, 2015| Leave a Comment »
A DEMON’S ADVICE
But trust not your sighs to angels, ever.
They shall take each warming gust of breath,
Snatch and sew them swiftly to their own leaden wings.
So booted with heavy lustre and drunk on praise,
They hardly rise, flapping fiercely,
Singing golden geometries, scattering fiery alphabets.
Phosphorescent spinning flies,
Web-caught in luscious word.
Spider He bejewels them, soft and silk wrapped.
Dumb and fearless, a multitude of choiring gnats.
Only one thing the gods themselves fear, and that is disbelief.
And laughter, maybe, certainly, laughter.
And a free vote.
Not big on democracy are these deity.
No countenance for suggested alternatives.
If it’s a viewpoint you want, a demon’s your man:
All the angles, all the catch, all the numberless ins and outs.
Tried them all, tested, weighed, annotated, risks assessed.
Goat footed and fleet, we nibble nimbly across the cliff-faces
Of most portentious Glory, around the storm-flared nostrils,
The beetled brow, the forest eyebrows.
Ignoring the ineffable, we lick the salt of the particular,
The delicious and peculiar answer.
Down to earth, most rational, mathematical.
Solomon knew a thing or two, and that he got from us,
Smart man. You could do worse than converse.
Here’s a taste. A word or two in your ear….
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, black and white print, book of voices, decay, future visions, Merddin Wyllt, Merlin, photography, Poetry, seer on June 2, 2015| 2 Comments »
MERDDIN WYLLT BY THE FIRESIDE ( from Book of Voices)
I wear my clothes counterclockwise.
My shoes on backwards.
I know the squint.
The footprints, sprait and scent
Of demons and angels,
Know the words for weed and herb.
I tread with care, can recite
The tree of ancestors, the cries of beasts,
The line unbroken back
To warrior gods and giants.
And yet I cannot cast from me
The dream of endless cities,
The cantankerous clamour
Of the multitude, dull and deceitful.
I am good and bad with art and skill
Yet cannot unpeel from eyes this
Pall of paltry appeasements,
The children of lack walking
Endless square desolation
Who know too much,
But in the wrong ordering;
Whose priests draw paper gold
And silver dust
From bellies disbelieving and gnawed;
Whose bones grate chalk and sleepless;
Whose days neat piled and numbered,
A clarity of vast apathy, bright coloured
In flicker cold fires.
Stumbling through floods,
Warring ever the wrong foes,
Unbelieved, unbelieving,
A roaring tumble to consensual void.
We shall slam, it seems, to senselessness,
Yard by yard, ungrow, untend, untread,
Grow slim and thin and lustreless;
Leafless in Spring, sapless in dawn,
Know neither sun nor moon;
Shun light, fear dark, ignore warnings.
The stories new and feckless
Repeated endlessly, a lullaby
Of excuse.
Eaten up, burnt, gagged on smoke,
A scum of oil, a bitter silence,
A wormwood of tears.
—
( The Book of Voices will be a work of pieces arrived at by chance, words floated insistently at random times, other voices, mine or from elsewhere, who can say…)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, biophilia, continuance, dawn, grace, hunger for more, Irfon Valley, landscape, landscape photography.pastoral, need, Poetry, survival, temperance, Wales, world on June 1, 2015| 4 Comments »
One more time
Words congeal,
Nest in dawn light.
Enough is the
Expanding breath,
Round, sent out blue,
Seeking peace.
Enough the slow fall,
Enough the dream.
One more time
Gathered, harboured.
Precise is the prayer:
Extinguish the
Hungry fire.
Only this:
That ceaseless hunger:
Cascading decay,
Mistaken for upwards.
A race diminished
Striving for worth,
Consumed and driven.
No art but blunder.
Graceless the fall.
In the pale of its cool,
In the wash of the mist,
In slowing breath and moment
Can we learn to rest easy?
Wanting nothing but enough,
As if we were the last
To ever be here.
Seeded in peace,
Dwelt and released.
A song sighed,
Never forgot.
A world haunted
With beauty
All remaining.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ambience, art, landscape, photography, Poetry, rain, spring, Wales, weather on May 20, 2015| Leave a Comment »
A feathered crouch
Cool and slewed wind
Mountains hunch
Shuffle in and out
Tides of rain
A slow long tune.
A green nation
Rules the cuckoo’s voice
Stretched long the river rings
Vivid is the wood
Tousled the tall larch
Fathoms deep the bluebell haze
Grey and dappled
All sorrow weighed with joy
In tonsured cities
Days careful are numbered
Then forgot.
—
