TALIESIN REVOLVES
The Living and the Dying:
Dipping in, dipping out, spinning, turning, returning.
This string, this blue cord, this mysterious line.
Slipping past the gatekeeper of dawn and sunset,
The dream rim, horizon’s cauldron.
The answer to crafty questions.
No one survives the heroic ideal,
Except transformed, ploughed back into and out of Time,
Through the door of the fortress that turns.
These ancient watching animals in the stream
Of the constellations, time creators outside of time.
Watch the movements from the physical to the ethereal.
“I underwent transformations, I circulated.”
Time is his landscape,
The bardic occupation of weaving the past into the present,
Kneading the present back into the past, the past into the present.
I was alive.
I was dead
About the aeons of the fortress,
About the one’s like kings,
How long their dwelling place.
I slept on a hundred islands,
In the seas of heaven, the firmament.
I mutated, I went around,
I am dissolved and passed through,
Strained and purified.
He passes through. He slices through.
The darkness, not understood until death comes.
Cian, Afagddu, Gwiwan.
O dyfynwedyd gwawt
The deep speaker, the speaker from the deep,
Passionately brought forth.
Not the quietness.
The deep ones emerge in the voice
Of the bard and the audience,
A flow above the shining drink.
The deep one becomes flesh
Dwfyn dyfu ygnawt
The shapeshifter,
Singing his own deathsong,
Uther, dead and singing,
Becomes Taliesin by this voice.
Nothing but skin and bone.
—
simonhlilly 