
SEEDS
The seeds of sorrow
and joy
Are always present.
.
Take a little time
To cultivate
The seeds
of joy.
–
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Poetry, time, art, metaphysics, perception, awareness, consciousness, landscape, Wales on August 8, 2022| Leave a Comment »
SEEDS
The seeds of sorrow
and joy
Are always present.
.
Take a little time
To cultivate
The seeds
of joy.
–
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged consciousness, language, metaphysics, mind, Poetry, time on July 25, 2022| 2 Comments »
ELECTRIC SILENCE
Memory is an electric silence.
Snowstorm at midnight
The tyre tracks we follow disappearing fast.
All the words, all the words,
Settle thickly obscuring what lies beneath.
If you do not know that moonlit void,
Without a body, without a thought,
Freedom shall elude you.
Racing on,
The road vanishing
Under the weight of white noise.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, art, bardic, consciousness, Gwyn ap Nudd, landscape, mortality, myth, Poetry, rebirth, souls, transformation, Wales on June 7, 2022| Leave a Comment »
WILD HUNT
I am lost
So I am yours, Gwyn.
Driven mad, worn thin,
By the fickle certainties of man,
The lies of the blood
In the lees of trust.
To slip and wriggle
Into cracks and crevices,
To numb as many seconds
As we may.
Kneel down in the soil
And weep.
You are clay that knows death
And have learnt a mechanical time
So as to watch its coming.
The whispered “This is how it is”.
That is a lie weighed down
By the phantasms of others’ dreams,
Souls worn wan draped in dust.
If we are not reborn
Then where does this yearning come from?
If we are not reborn
Why does music bring so many tears?
If we are not reborn
Whence the joy, whence the sorrow?
If we are not reborn
How do our desires arise?
Whence our dissatisfactions?
If we are not reborn
What purpose does hiraeth serve?
What purpose the stirring of the blood?
The bones of trees
I turn to small hopes.
Collect your souls, Gwyn.
Scatter them into a new Spring.
–
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, cold, consciousness, landscape, landscape photography, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Poetry, seasons, time, Wales, Winter on May 19, 2022| Leave a Comment »
The minutes crack open and bleed cold.
Breath is chapped and hesitant in semi-quavers, a minor key.
The hawk is ice that hunts unrepentant the mountain heights.
Slay complacent warmth, the fickle needs of small hearts.
The flutter of joy, cackle of crow.
A silent field: whiteness extends to the very mists of deep mind.
Carved walls at the edges of space, words written there:
We are extinguished and free.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, consciousness, landscape, metaphysics, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Poetry, time, tradition, trees, vision, Wales on May 15, 2022| Leave a Comment »
ALDER FOLD
Singing severed head
Folds and puts away
The blanket of space,
Rolls away time.
A comfort against poisons,
A comfort against memory.
Sunlit is the hall,
Spacious with birdsong.
The sound of the sea
In the sound of the words.
And there is no greater magic than this.
By the shore, by the river,
By the evening light,
By the dividing of the roads.
One gasp and it will be gone.
Floating down stream,
Lodged in the mud
Of a new world.
The root of the tongue.
The cotyledon of sight.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged consciousness, landscape, language, nature, perspective, Poetry, rivers, Wales on April 26, 2022| Leave a Comment »
RIVER WORDS
They do not say
What they sing
For your listening
But for their own joy.
No will of their own
But to find the deepest
And return.
Where streams meet:
A birth of spirals.
By the bridge
The patterns hold steady.
Acquiescence to the way.
We think we know them
By their names we know them.
We know them by their names.
You name the river
‘Destroyer of the children of men’.
I name this river
‘Gentle mother of fields’
The river calls itself:
‘Longing for stillness
In the deep’.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, change, consciousness, landscape photography, metaphysics, nature, Poetry, roses, time, transformation, Wales on March 25, 2022| 2 Comments »
THE ROSES
The roses
They have been in bud
For months
Through sun and rain.
Now they open,
Bloom for a day or two
Giving joy to all,
Then fade and
Fall apart.
The roses.
The roses.
They throw off their beauty
Like dancers.
They value more
Their roots
And their thorns.
The blood red hips,
The hard won strength
To go on.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, art, bardic, cold, consciousness, landscape, landscape photography, metaphysics, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Poetry, the numinous, time, Winter on March 13, 2022| Leave a Comment »
THEIR NAMES
Their names are the doors they wait behind.
Dreaming, dreaming, they thus dream us.
A silver moon scythes the snow fruit that admits us.
Timeless is the round dance of breath.
There is constant war in heaven, and hunting,
And fast, hot seduction.
How else, otherwise, could it be here?
The stars pour themselves into the hills.
There will be ice upon the marshes.
–
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bardic, bird-god, consciousness, cosmology, death, myth, Poetry, ravens, vision, war on March 3, 2022| 1 Comment »
RAVEN IS POET
1
I have built my nest in the billowing cloud.
My phurba beak subdues the demons of hunger and despair.
This bright eye measures the generations of worms
And the oracles of shattered bone.
I ride the cracks between worlds on the wind of stars.
Does not my voice peel back all illusion?
What wealth is there here but the wealth of memory?
And I am not unfeeling.
I remember all their names, all their reasons.
Their genealogies are the forests of my delight.
A gathering at suppertime where I cloak the unseeing
In a sheen of knives.
My philosophy, you see, is alchemical, pure and simple.
I shall eat all suns, steal all warmth, reveal all truth that is lie.
There is no sin except satiety.
No song that is not beautiful.
No poet that does not dissect the foolishness of the world
And feed off it.
A long-shadowed cross, I am nailed as a sacrifice and a hero.
Fast, my deep is deeper than all skies.
My deep is the deep within.
Navigator of the impossible, I have the voice of icebergs,
The gravel of continental subduction.
I am generous with praise:
I will laugh joyous at the capers of poets and the drunkenness of heroes.
I wheel and turn patient as the stars,
Wait for the sickle moon to bring it all down to food.
The eloquence of continuance.
The continuance of dreaming.
Consume and consummation, it is all one to a raven poet.
Laughter is the weapon of last resort.
–
2
Snow on the mountain.
Hazels flower in the valley.
Still no signs of any wisdom.
Snow on the mountain.
Silence after the last battle.
The world again
Shall fill with birdsong.
3
Spin in gorse-bright light.
Dance of black cloak, black knives.
Exultant raven warriors.
4
I am Dark Mountain.
My wife is Midnight.
My daughters are Hunger Sated and Sleek Breast.
My sons are Piercing Hunger and Arrow Straight.
We are descendants of Snow on the Mountain
And Utter Darkness.
The Well of Memory and The Blasted Tree
Are our dwelling places.
Soot Black
Ocean Depth
Bright Brow
Radiant Ash Tree
Thief of Knowledge.
Turner of the Wheel
Season’s End
Hunger Abates.
Wind and waters name us thus.
Mountains name us,
The vast sky names us thus.
5
At the end of the universe ( or at its beginning)
There sits a raven-headed god on a stone throne.
I have seen it. It is so.
He has one eye that sees all things.
He has three eyes for the past, present and future.
He has four eyes that roam in every direction.
He has five eyes that glimmer in the dark and see all things.
He it is who makes the eggshell curve of the sky,
The white light of day. I have seen it. It is so.
When the sky was broken open and the earth fell out
That is when the ravens were born – in the space between.
6
From the bird god’s breath there comes a warm wind.
Let it blow the seeds of destruction away.
Let it extinguish the embers of hate.
May the needful dead fall ripe to our praying beaks.
A thousand ages is his out-breath.
A thousand ages he will breathe it all in again.
Sky and land and the holy air
Will wrap in silence about his dreaming.
We shall be named one by one
And nested in the cliffs of his gaze.
7
There is sufficient death.
We have no need
For the glut of war.
Our falling, floating dance
Inscribes the air.
We tumble towards
Our altar, earth.
We rise to sun,
World-filled cries.
This dance we dance
Is for the dance
Of life and death,
For the bird-headed god
At the end and beginning of all things.
For the drink of it.
For the breath of it.
For the bliss of it.
Raven poet I am.
This is the truth.
This is how it is.
–
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Bardic rant, consciousness, cosmology, death, history, moon, myth, night, Poetry, reincarnartion., the numinous, time, transformation, transmigration, warrior on February 4, 2022| Leave a Comment »
WARRIOR PRAYER
Oh Moon-Face. Your unguent drips from my fingertips.
Shades of dead universes flit across the dark sky.
We long for this as much as we long for otherness.
Moon-Face, we construct the spells that feed you,
So sleek and willow-limbed.
This is how we made you:
A womb to hold all the weeping dead.
Born again as owls, as worms, as dreams in blooming girls.
In flowers pushed up through sacred, spiced earth.
Poured out with the salmon spawn and the eggs of serpents.
Split open and oozed in the nests of eagles,
Drying in the daylight, voiceless and crying.
The taste I remember – iron and oceans,
And the slip slop of long tides
And the waking shape of salt.
The taste of footprints and warm belly
And secret clefts and caves of echoes.
The taste I remember of the sharp bright edge,
Honed bright and sunlight, severed
By its arcing swing.
Oh Moon-Face. You eat the seconds so.
You eat the minutes and the moments.
Bound, wired and woven to the haft of sound.
The blade that cuts through space.
The light so soft, it can eat life and death
And never be fuller than it is, than it is.
Moon-Face. Keep your promise
And we shall die again, happy.
We will not forget your sweet hunger.
–