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 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 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.
–
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, consciousness, landscape, landscape photography, nature, photography, Poetry, seasons, time, Wales, weather, Winter on January 30, 2022| 2 Comments »
A small breath of wind lifts the mist ‘til more blows in.
Two days, three days frost, has melted
And the birds are in the leaf litter.
The mountain’s voice says
‘Winter is not over yet’
But here in the valleys there is a small respite.
A day or two, perhaps, of gentler thoughts.
The world revolves around us here.
There is lamentation and the groans of fools from afar.
The waves, perceptible and arcane,
Encroach on the plans of contented futures.
But here, for a day or two,
Will be blue calm and the hope
Of buds and roots.
–
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged consciousness, landscape, New Year's day, Poetry, rain, time, Wales, Winter on January 1, 2022| Leave a Comment »
NEW YEAR’S DAY
When there is nothing good to say
Then silence is better.
It is a calm day today,
Small rain in a dark sky.
Above the quiet valleys,
A high wind from the west is roaring.
The last day on Earth will be like this:
Resting in its own beauty,
All known, nothing named.
All reasons self-extinguished.
Watched over, cherished, belonging.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, art, awen, bardic, Bardic rant, consciousness, memory, metaphysics, myth, Philosophy, photography, Poetry, printmaking, song, Taliesin, THe Black Book of Carmarthen, the numinous, time, tradition, Wales, Welsh language on December 5, 2021| 5 Comments »
A lot of my writing this year has been towards an art/word project inspired by The Black Book of Carmarthen, a small, handwritten manuscript containing poems collected over a lifetime by one person. It is the oldest known manuscript written in the Welsh language. A mixture of ancient bardic poems and prayers, it is at once mundane and transcendent, simple and utterly baffling. The words that come to me are either reflecting some of the imagery or subjects of the fifty odd pieces, or dwell on the nature of the author and the continuity of language and writing. The art works I am making mainly combine parts of the manuscript pages overlain with my own woodblock prints from decades ago. There will, probably, be a book that combines text with image. It is in no way a translation of the original text. It is one artist’s reflections of the magical mirror and timelessness of ancient books.
MER KERTEV KEIN (Black Book)
(The marrow of fine songs)
It is a river
Uncurling in caves,
A white torrent on dark slick rocks.
It is a shoreline cave where mystery is born by echoes,
Far from comfort, where opposites couple in the roaring of it.
Spanning centuries each word tumbles combining elements.
Shadow worlds are dressed in time to shatter and rebuild the fragments.
Oh, speckle-breasted thrush,
Thrice the song to sing.
Morning rain.
Rain of morning.
Dawn storm.
Eternal song.
A river where meaning slips like fishes,
A flash, a flank, and gone.
The next ripple, the next wave, the scintillating light.
Umbral echoes.
It dances from sound to sound.
A juggler slipping from stone to stone
In the midstream rush. Where next? Where next?
And the foaming roar of it:
The world dancing elements and prophecy
And the arc of words cast up and caught, too fast for the eye.
A stream, a stream, of passion itself.
Sound clothed in the names of things,
The naked, naked sound.
A river of God’s being,
A bowstring caught and released,
The mouth’s harp
And its breath drum rhythm song.
—
There are spirits here
There are ghosts
Where I see these landscapes,
Familiar, sunlit, wild
I have never been.
I am haunted by the names
And by the meanings
Within the meanings I know.
Other pages in other hands:
Mirrored, pushing through.
I am become a palimpsest of prayer-
The angels with clawed feet
Offering golden torcs.
—
A language of waves,
Of echoing empty hills.
My eyes water the seeds of words,
Grow vast forests.
The dance of sounds:
Lost timeless for a while,
We dance and dance.
The memories are not ours
That lodge in our hearts.
My soul fragments to the four quarters
As though I am already buried.
There is a cold wind from the north.
A woman who is not a woman
Moves at the edges of my sight
Whispering rhymes with berry-stained fingertips.
One of Three and Three in One.
Before Eden we quake.
The Tower was too high,
The Tree was too bright.
The Flaming Sword
That drove us outwards
We stole for shovels and mattocks.
—
simonhlilly 