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Posts Tagged ‘black and white’

LLYM AWEL verse 10

Ottid eiry, guin goror mynit;
Llum guit llog ar mor;
Meccid llvwyr llauer kyghor.

Snow falls, mountains are fringed in white;
These bleak trees: masts on the sea;
A coward has endless excuses.

1
Knowing what we know
What should be done?
We ask ( fearing the answer).

The cold clear cut,
The slow scribbled signature
Of snow.

Timber shattered,
The mast trees weep.
Stripped fingers
They have nothing to say.
The cry, long dry cry of winter.
Glass sea, glass sky,
Broken.

2
What is slight
Sustains us.
Rills and ridge
Croak under snow.

A laughter cough of ice.
Harsh is the wind on the edge of the valley.
No kind words for the hesitant.

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And is it not true,
Waiting a while in darkness
There blooms a sky
Once blank
Now full more and
More of stars?

And so, too,
in silence waiting
We see thoughts roar and multiply,
Emotions self-arise, endlessly,
and, fecund, roll
To oblivion.

It happens without effort,
This stretching, purring cat close by,
These hillsides echoing
With wild cries of foxes.
This air, motionless, cool,
A taste wrapped in grass and woodsmoke.

Without edge,
Without distinction,
Mind fills up all space.

The world, a cup
Half empty of sorrow,
Is half full of joy.
Yet we thirst
And must drink
Regardless.

Gulping life,
A taste to keep us,
A withstanding
of emptiness.

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LLYM AWEL Verse 9

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Ottid eiry o dv riv;
Karcharaur goruit, cul biv;
Nid annuyd hawdit hetiv.

“Snow fall on the side of the slope;
The horse is prisoner, the cattle thin;
It is nothing like a summer day today.”

1
Snow leans on the low slopes
Rain slants here in the valley
Cold slides from the hillsides,
Shades the day, the bitter night.
For weeks now no grass grows,
The horses stamp and mutter.

2
The world is hobbled
Stalled by snow
Nothing can be done
But wait
Counting ribs
Thin in hunger chains.
Cold airs slide white slopes
The valley’s continual rain slant.
In the dark
A horse lifts up a foot,
Puts down a foot.
Time is that slow,
Rolling down to emptiness.

3
We ache
With soft remembrance:
The scents of summer.
Mudsplashed and wan
Our churned meadow,
The heavy roof.
Huddled,
We long
For long sleep
And a dream or two
Of love and feast
And brightness.

4
The skies billow like oceans,
The stars, a long blizzard.
We are roofed in darkness
And a sunless weight.
The manacles of iron cold,
The chains of frost.
Bitter is the taste of winter days,
An ivy crown, a holly bed.
Poor animals, all of us,
Declining.

5
We can not dream of summer –
Those few, spiced, long days.
Souls float free from skin,
All the sky to move within.

We can not do but what we must
To flick off the gnaw of cold
And bite of hunger.

We cling to the swirling skirts of winter,
Dare not let go.
To fall too far,
Too thin to rise,
Too far to hope.
We must stay
Within our means
And shrink our dignity
Day by day.

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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.

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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…

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Llym awel 3, improvisations.

The third stanza contrasts the atmospheric tumult of winter with the motionless, perhaps frozen, lake and the lifeless stillness of the remains of vegetation around its shore and in the woods. The complex sounds and rhythms of the first line give way to the stark alliteration and simple rhymes of the second and third lines.
The overwhelming impression is of a stripped hollowness, everything destroyed by the storm. The key is “cold bed” conjuring a flat, unwelcoming expanse of coldness. All the emotion of the narrator is summed up in those two words.

Oer guely, lluch rac brythuch gaeaw;
Crin calew, caun truch;
Kedic awel, coed im bluch.

“Cold bed, the lake in winter’s tumult;
Withered stalk, broken reed;
Violent wind, the trees stripped bare.”

For now
It is, surely, a cold cauldron-
This seething winter sky
Within the mute
And broken vessels
Of the earth;
Hollow, rounded,
Iron still.
Held
The grey lake,
The naked wood
Stripped bare
( the suitors of the sky
Voracious for space),
Ripped and opened
To uncaring wild heavens.

Cold bed this lake, death-still,
Through winter’s rage;
Withered is the stalk,
Broken the reed;
Violent the wind
That has stripped bare
The trees.

Broken withered still the soil,
Still cold the unmoving expanse of lake,
Cold as death.
That which bends is broken,
That which yeilds is bare.
Nothing moves
But winter’s endless roar.

Winter’s roar.
All, broken.
Slapped down, the lake,
Cold, folded, comfortless.
Hollow the woods,
Ripped of leaves.
What was, is remains.
Severed, the warmth
Of summer

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Llym Awel, second stanza. Improvisations.

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Ton tra thon, toid tu tir;
Goruchel guaetev rac bron banev bre;
Breit allan or seuir
.

The alliteration of the first line rolls and rumbles like the waves that are described therein, then stutters and becomes harsh as the roaring sound is described, followed by a diminishing gentleness of the vanquished sloping land. The last line has a shocked gulping sadness, or an amazed sorrow. It frames and positions the narrator in an emotional as well as a natural landscape.

“Wave on wave, covering the side of the land;
Very loud the roar against the high hill;
A wonder anything remains.”

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Wave tops wave.
A coupling clamber
A mating roar,
cast seed
spray spume.
Before one, before all,
up sloping land.
Seige unopposed,
howled hunger thrown,
A wild encroachment,
a burst breach
Long and longer reach,
a tumble.
The high hill groans.
What can stand,
what can stay?
From this slide skywards,
From this steep,
utter submergence?

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In the mist at daybeak:
Ghost of whitened
mountain
Climbs thunderclouds.

Under eaves,
through slow rain spatter,
Small bats chase,
wings squeeking.

Still is the air.
We tumble
and totter
through space.

We are now such
A tower of cloud
And rain.

A roar,
A drumroll,
A whisper,
Percussed silence.

Leaving glistening
Green skin:
This world.

As she sleeps
I find her slopes
And gullies.
I love the
Familiar folds.
A rising mountain
I become
And she,
The deep greens
And valley dark.
No distinction:
One rising breath,
One landscape.
We, a loved land
Clouded and clear.

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The last week or so I have found time and space to push on with a few art-book projects I have been wanting to complete. One is a printed paper copy of “The House of Trees”. It is quite a long poem, but even so a little short for a stand-alone book – at least one that feels like a real book rather than a parish church guidebook! So I have been working out how to interleaf the text pages with image pages. Originally I was thinking of one image page facing each new section of the poem, but practically, because of the varying lengths of the sections, this did not work so well. So I have decided to greatly increase the number of images so that each spread has one image page facing the text page. This has the advantage of consistency, and also of increasing the number of pages to about eighty or ninety – quite a nice thickness! Luckily, I had taken quite a few photographs on the Isle of Skye, upon which the poem is based. On of the most interesting things on Skye was the number of high quality artist’s galleries. I was particularly attracted by several woodcut artists. Woodcut and print are a match made in heaven, so I tried to see if I could get that jewel-like light and dark richness by working with my images.

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I have used quite simple techniques (complexity is beyond my computer skills), mainly playing around with contrast and gradients. The end result depends quite a lot on the original colour photos, but I have managed to get some rich, deep tones that remind me of wood engravings, and others that more resemble aquatint etchings. Here are a few that I like. Most of the images I am happy to present as near abstracts, suggestions of landscapes, textures and grains of wood and stone. As they are complementing, rather than illustrating, the text, I want them to set an atmosphere as much as anything else.

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You may remember some of the photographs that I used to accompany “The House Of Trees” as I was writing it and posting it here earlier in the year. I have used some of the same images but made many of them more graphic.

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I expect I will try printing some of these out for myself on etching -type archive paper, to see haow they fare as objects in their own right.

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I hope the juxtaposition of panoramic spaces with close up textural detail will keep the interest of the eye as it moves from page to page.

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Somehow the tonal reversals suit the nostalgic, Otherworldly flavour, where mirroring and transformations are a common motif. Also somehow fits in with the eye of memory and metaphysical meditations also….

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BLINK
(for Nathan)

How is it some patterning of the familiar, some phrase turned this way, that way turns more than echo, enlarges, exponents, fractures into its own chaos pattern?
We blink and the world disappears. We sleep and the universe unravels. We talk to the distance, converse with the invisible, as if our thoughts had pulses. And then there is that silence, in that forest, where that tree falls, unhindered, unremarked, unwitnessed. And the question marks the doubt.
What will be missed?
Slowly turning, slow breezes of distant breath,
We are enwebbed,
Weightless, waiting our turn.
A sweep, a cascade,
A clamour, a whisper,
A yes, an and but,
A slight widening of eye,
A lick of tongue to lip,
A spark, a cinder reseeded.
Upon an ash of dull vocabulary, a sudden dust devil dancing, acrobatic heretic, acrostic cross-stitch. And there it is, temporal flux. Gravity well. A siphon, a vortex, a cascade of neurons inventing new species. A bloom of bacteria basking in the bright futures of near-death.
Nothing is further from the truth, it never crossed my mind, a creature of habit, transfixed in the headlamps. A tumble of the banal: our raw matter to tease out, to squeeze.
I am winged yet
And spinning,
Woven somewhere,
Laced, enbroidered,
Pricked out,
Sketched.
Not quite becoming,
Hesitant.
You were and are a mirror of sorts, silvered, distant. A moon sailing through cloud. There, intimated, expressed, uncovered. A lapse in time. Time-lapse. Shutter speed. Blink. Blink. Forgetting,
Remembering,
Forgetting.
To whom belongs the face in the mirror?( Always looking a little surprised, a little disappointed). Of all the voices in my head, strange rainforest bouquet, there was, is, will be, one more calm, one more complex, a careful equation. News from Nowhere.

” Matter
is merely
mind
deadened
by the development of habit
to the point
where the breaking up
of these habits
is very difficult.”

Stubborn, fixed. It is alchemical. I, alembic, a host of raven wings and a lost crown of kings.
Here, it grows late. There: later or earlier. Those who watch, watch over the sleepers. Those who sleep, dream the waking world. Blink. It begins. Blink. It ends. The mirror remains a mirror reflecting upon what it is not. Blink. Turn away, it ceases. Turn back, it re-appears.
As if never gone away. As if never gone by. As if never gone.
Even, even, they say,
In a complete vacuum,
In a complete darkness,
No matter how dark,
No matter how hard they try,
They say,
There always, always, seems to be
Half a photon
Somehow
Remaining.
Light
Persisting.
(Just
A
Thought.)

—–

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windswept

7

The long song

The song is always: if only.
(Not the song of the trees
Not the song of the falling waters,
Nor the wind that carries the grey storm wrack),

But the song of those huddled about the fires,
Bone thin, crack-voiced.
And the song too
Of the squire and laird,
Dissatisfied with their winnings,
Their great gambled losses.

Only those covered by the hills
Covered by the rath, the dun,
The hawthorn bent and ringing,
Only the eternal dancers
Have found another song,
Abjuring Time,
Disregarding judgement.

They sing of the edges between things,
The instant when one slips into other,
The knife blade of love into hate,
The cry of the oystercatcher
That spins from joy to grief to joy,
And is all and is none of these things.

They know the call of gold,
Have tasted its dust.
They know the answer to freedom,
(What all seek and none understand),
Have left it, found it,
Given it up.
Those in dream need no other dream.

Those who know they are in dream
Delight in twilights,
The subtle glance,
The hesitant dance.

But here, bombastic, needy
Sure of something, the nation stands
Once more calling for something
That cannot be given.

It cannot be given,
This independence, this freedom you seek.
It cannot be offered, it cannot be bargained for,
It cannot be voted in, it cannot be passed in law.

You will never see it, never reach it.
Nor is it a haven, a prize, a reward, a right.

The house of freedom
Is the empty wall by the long shore.
The house of independence
Is a house open to clouds,
A mist of trees within.

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