DARK NIGHT GARDEN
In the dark night garden.
My throat scratched
by the ice light of stars.
.
Owls soothe the blackness
As best they can.
.
The drip drip of water
Is the passing of eternal time.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged consciousness, Haiku-ish, landscape, nature, Poetry, time, Wales on April 4, 2021| Leave a Comment »
DARK NIGHT GARDEN
In the dark night garden.
My throat scratched
by the ice light of stars.
.
Owls soothe the blackness
As best they can.
.
The drip drip of water
Is the passing of eternal time.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, art, consciousness, deep ecology, landscape, landscape photography, mystery, night, Poetry, seasons, stars, Wales, Winter on March 22, 2021| Leave a Comment »
STONE AGE
Snow clouds drift below moon and stars.
The river roars its long distance.
.
What can can we do
But breathe in the warm smoke of fires
And huddle down into the skins of animals?
.
In this way
We become the world’s eyes
In long winter.
.
Hunters of stories
In the mists.
Recounters of the long herds
And the cunning wings.
.
Sustained by the strong life of others.
So we may sing their praises
And with our hands
Shape amber and jet
And flint and bone.
.
Beneath the one tree of starlight
And dancing, rising sparks.
–
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged being, Cambrian Mountains, consciousness, February, landscape, mortality, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Poetry, spring, the numinous, time, Wales, weather on March 12, 2021| Leave a Comment »
A RAINBOW WALKS
A rainbow walks the yellow hill.
Small birds know that Spring is coming.
The wide-winged hawks, too, wheel and watch.
The rain has reached us now,
Tapping the roof.
Our skies yawn wide here:
From the Radnor hills right round
Through Crychan forest and the hidden dive
To the Sugarloaf and the low lands beyond.
Epynt is the wall of centuries behind us,
The deep valleys of the Cambrians, an uncertain present.
The old stones have been removed,
Or lost, that pinned us to hope.
The roads run thin and crumble.
If you live forever, all this is of no consequence.
If you live one year, or two,
This doubt and uncertainty is extravagance.
Many hereabouts conjure their own futures
From a past they grasp as if it were theirs.
As well to leave it be, leave it be.
There is no power here but a rainbow
Walking, for a moment, the yellow hill.
And the flow of wind and cloud across the horizon
No one can see beyond.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birch trees, consciousness, landscape, mind, night, Poetry, sleep, stars, time, Wales, Winter on February 15, 2021| 2 Comments »
LULLABY
The hidden stars that the owls sing to.
The white branching birches shift from sight into sound.
The failing grains, the falling grains,
Tempered in Time’s wailing rivers.
We fail again to measure glory,
So sleep weightless and numb.
But that is what keeps us sane:
Stick to the lines once learned.
Recite nothing that breaks the rhyme,
The tick and tock of year in, year out
To forbid the howl of ghosts
And the crack of bone.
Keep the marrow hid, untasted.
The slow circling wings have the names of gods that are patient.
The fine threads, the dust of mould settles in.
Sleep, so as not to dream this dream.
Sleep sight and sound.
Slow sighs: the rise and fall of life within.
The woven world, golden with words.
A throb of muscles and distant gunfire.
Keep the visions in the flame of the hearth.
Keep the prophecy in the cooling cauldron.
The future shall be our breakfast
But now we rest, bathed in owls,
The hidden stars, the birch’s bone fingers,
A blanket weight, an imperceptible falling.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, consciousness, language, myth, Poetry, psyche, story, time, words on February 4, 2021| 2 Comments »
THESE MAPS, THESE ROADS
These maps, these roads, written and rewritten word on word.
Size and distance, though, these are not to be measured.
The roads and maps are real but travelled, somehow,
By ships that fly, by pigs that speak, by horses
That move and yet not move.
The shape of words – that is the key
To all that is and is not.
The holy lines that sum up all dimensions,
That lie so perfectly,
That birth sound out of silence and void.
Chase the edge of one thing, the infinite borders,
The central compass points.
Trace with keen fingertips the way they merge and separate.
The same pattern is in the whorls of your hand and always has been.
The world is measured by its forgetfulness.
The eternal is uncovered by those with perfected memory.
No words left orphaned, no thought muddied or misplaced.
A perfect fractal prison of a million voices,
Laying down the roads and all the maps.
Remembering, remembering, it is all remembering.
Beyond the gods and monsters
There is a perturbation of light and shadow.
Beyond light and shadow, a flickering notion of this and that.
Beyond this and that, a line of movement and a point of stillness.
A certain chain of gravity, (that is love and jealousy),
And a flow of iron-grey chains.
The roads, the winds of space, move along,
The paths of gods and worlds dreaming,
Dreaming they have time and space and something,
Something else, a name, a reason, a future, a history.
A certain trajectory, a ricochet away into story.
New words, same roads, same houses, new owners,
Same walls, same ghosts, same roads, new roads,
New names.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, consciousness, darkness, deep time, lost languages, lost traditions, Poetry, the past, warrior elite v. hidden mothers on January 29, 2021| Leave a Comment »
DARK LANGUAGE
It is not to find a new whore to worship.
Nor to glory in our own juices.
It is not to be comforted in the warm skin of animals,
The trees roaring to oblivion in the hearth.
It is to summon the dark language
Not spoken since the ice has melted.
The wisdom of witches bending the storm winds
And tasting righteous blood.
Banished beyond dawn and sunset,
Banished beyond the myths of brightness
And simple good death in war.
So old it would not even be recognised –
The hum of bees, the chorus of sparrows.
Acid-etched into the deepest rock,
The ache within molecular passions.
Blue electric sparks off tongue-tips
Singing the dead to rise up and talk.
The dead, soft and blue-blooded,
We will eat them to remember
The nerve tides, star-tingled.
Doubting the echo of endless thoughts,
Speaking in slivered silence, silver laughing out loud.
We breathe to serve, to record absurdity.
The dreaming language breathes us real.
Small wonders, we die out eternally.
The dreaming language beneath the sound and sense,
Beneath the patterns of stars, their names,
And their bitter rivalries.
One step beyond madness-
It is impossible to return from there.
A vacant house inhabited by echoes.
To hold all impossibilities at one instant
A fractal language that spins old darknesses.
—