Posted in Uncategorized, tagged civilisation, deep ecology, existence, extinction, perspective, planet consciousness, Poetry on May 5, 2019| Leave a Comment »
LONG DREAM
This desolation is ours
Allowing no other song.
Our history of misery, threadbare and golden
Would not keep a family of mice
Alive on a winter’s evening.
Such honour we give poison
And the acid tongues that spit it out.
One by one we snip our roots
To free us from this sullen holy soil.
Cool mountain air and the rain
washes distance away.
It says:
You are not important enough to be hated.
Even a long dream will still be woken from.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged awareness, concsiousness, existence, mind, mynyddoidd cambrian mountains, Poetry, senses, thought, Winter on February 27, 2018| 1 Comment »
GHOST WORDS, HAUNTED WORDS
Do you know
What you are
When you are asleep?
Winter trees –
It is easy to see
What they are thinking.
A filigree of branches
The grey oaks
Wriggle their limbs
Between the long centuries.
Today I remembered
A dream of water
Perhaps from ten years ago.
And saying this
More some such arise,
Memories like dead poets:
Complete images in total silence.
It is easier to see the illusion
Of television
If the sound is turned down.
As if one entranced sense
Is not quite enough.
Awake whilst others sleep,
Somewhat like becoming a ghost,
I suspect –
Thoughts coming
In a different order,
And voices
From unexpected places.
What roads do thoughts take
When they have
Passed through
And left us wondering?
The fire is singing
Like an old man
Making tea,
Whistling a tune
Between his teeth.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, disaster, elegy, existence, fire in Llangammarch, grief, life, loss, Poetry, tragedy, Wales on October 30, 2017| 6 Comments »
Llangammarch Blaze
There now, lay it all down,
The soft memory and the memory of hard bone.
After the year’s first true frost
A dead sheep lies in the field becoming a dance of hawks and ravens.
And on a lonely hillside unremarked
A blaze has born the babies away.
A smudge of smoke and the light of morning
Is no prayer of peace to ones who wait
Empty-hearted for better news.
The village, warm now in sun, silent.
Thoughts unthought of before – friends vanished,
Those known, now unplaced, a hollowness
Around memory clung to.
It is an uncertain anchor to hold on to –
This world that blinks apart from day to day.
Should we rise and flow like the oak leaves
On the cold dark currents of the Irfon?
Or wrap around like ivy, cling like lichen bloom
To this weathered stone.
We are a thin soil that the wind will blow and the waters leach.
The babies are gone who should be dancing.
The mothers silent, slowly dissappearing.
Pick it back to the bare bones.
Feed the world with our ripped out sorrow.
We are nothing. But we were loved.
Once named, now melted back to everything.
A thin soil on scarred stone.
Golden are the tree tops, a palest blue sky.
The ravens dance in their ring, in and out,
While the sun still shines,
While the sun still shines.
written as the news was emerging about the great and tragic loss in our small village. A family house destroyed by fire in the night, a few children escaping, but many more lost. Llangammarch now besieiged by hordes of prying press and film crews.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Dinas, existence, landscape, landscape photography, Poetry, Wales on May 30, 2017| 1 Comment »
We are only a dream here to dream.
An exhalation of hill and forest.
A fancy of slab rock and weeds.
A drift of fog taken shape then dissipated.
Hardly even a thing, hardly a name.
A point of reference to a moment, green and eternal.
This field of dream, this song thrush stilled,
This fall of light rain, this cool dissolution,
This river breath.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, awareness, belonging, connection, darkness, existence, landscape photography, night, Poetry, presence, world on December 29, 2016| 2 Comments »
The Blossoming Magnitude
I step out.
Thick darkness
And above night fog.
A few stars come and go.
This world
We cannot ever leave.
Every inch of us
Reeled out from its heart.
Made to stretch
And grow and fade
Between each breath
And each stillness,
Between each moment
Of presence and absence.
The world pushes through.
Wherever we might go
This world, too, shall come.
We are seamless
And utterly loved.
A fragment only
In strange fragmented minds
That do not realise the utter silence
Contains the voices of all.
The utter silence that answers us
Is the blossoming magnitude
Of the simple ground.
A round flicker of star,
Tasted, acknowledged, named.
Never are we severed,
Never lost, nor alone,
Though the angry, hungry tide
Of voices may say it.
Our science is love
And our gravity, delight.
Obedient to our breath,
We come and go,
Remembering how it all goes.
A bowl of sky.
A bowl of earth.
Enough food there is
For all things.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged and such-like dreary leaden thoughts, art, emotion, endings, existence, landscspe photography, mystery, night, Poetry, sorrow, war, Winter on November 29, 2016| 2 Comments »
—
Soulless
To come out from the sorrow with wings
(The wind rising deepening thick darkness)
To find song that sings continuance
(The rain flown miles burns cold)
To find a haven, a hammocked clarity
(No stars, nor shadow, nor moon tonight)
The long roads aching empty, dreary, full of tears
(Lightless, limp, dreams splintered, knowing not the way to try)
Over the hills, bleak white drift forces itself into crevice and bank.
A slow, tempered piano hangs notes and melody, not new, nor remembered.
It echoes so and brings some small pillow of ease.
Firelight flickers,
All sink sleepless into dream.
A small thing it is to fail,
to cease, to become unmattered.
(The street empty, the empty house,
The mind revolving. The heart of things,
A sudden distance).
—-
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged evening, existence, loch, memory, Poetry, presence, remembering, shore on February 10, 2015| 2 Comments »
WHERE SHALL THESE GHOSTS
Where shall these
Ghosts, oblivious, remain?
Down by the shore
Counting dead-man’s-fingers,
Peeking in mermaid’s purses,
Teasing the mouths of anemones.
A ghost amongst ghosts,
Toes wet and dancing,
Sand-wriggled.
An audience of waves,
A laughter of gulls.
Enchanted
By hedgerow robins
And blackbirds after rain.
A cooling skein of late summer cloud.
Showered and drifting,
The pale washed sky.
Home, then, to warm silence,
A collected, amiable
Gathered-in darkness.
We are scattered, all,
Sown to seed the soil.
Strewn in time and place,
Nourished in small, bright things:
A voice, a scent, a feeling.
Reflected morning on a dew wet web,
As delicate as that, even.
Nothing to be proud of,
Nothing to disdain.
Held together by forgetting
And remembering, bursting
In and out of existence.
By the midgy lochside,
Mountains hidden,
A smudge of cloud.
The lap lap of waters,
The pooling dip of oars
On bright grey water,
The long islands rising
Anchored galleons of rock and green.
Crushed heather, rain wet grass,
The smell of woodsmoke and broth.
—-
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged appreciation, awareness, being, complexity, consciousness, existence, immeasurable delight, insignificant glories, life, memory, moments, ordinary extraordinariness, poetry art, tasting, transience measured, witnessing on December 4, 2013| 2 Comments »
SCRIBE, ENTANGLED
(Transience measured)
To carve in sound
The passing wings,
The roaring flicker of Time.
To hold up, turning slowly,
To reconsider, to honour,
The long and short moment
Immeasurable, of incalcuable value.
Ice equations melting with each sigh,
A collecting, falling, echo geometric.
Consummation by flame, bright dancing
For a moment, a transmutation ungraspable.
This location of variables,
Borrowed breath, quivered pattern,
Delineations: all immanent
Divinity.
Break the stream,
Suspend the pulse,
Question the lack of purpose,
The reason why,
And nothing further
Can be revealed
(The one answer already given).
This is the prize
For existing.
Why look round
For more?
—-
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blogs, comments, existence, Haiku, mirrors, plum sake, Poetry, rain, robin, silence, storm, words, worms on July 6, 2013| 3 Comments »
Another selection of comments and pieces inspired by other’s blog posts or blog comments. (We orchestrate…..)
NOISE
Prayer,
confessional,
creed.
God or Godless,
we ramble to ourselves
within our own bone cathedrals,
echoing with sighs and curses.
There is a completely soundproofed room
in some MidWest University.
No one had yet managed
to spend more than 45 minutes there.
Hullucinations after a few minutes.
We are not designed for silence or darkness.
We bleat and howl in our own jungles,
bleat and howl….
—
GIFT
This body,
This world:
A gift from a million suns.
—
NIGHT RAIN
A rain of words
puddle the page,
tongue-mind umbrella unfurls,
tastes flicker neon image,
dream world,
dream world.
—
MIRRORED
To see ourself reflected in the smile of our love
Is the only mirror should be allowed
Not the rotated smudge of silver window
Nor frozen shadows unbemused, inanimate.
—-
SQUALL
Whose soft words
Sweeping through
My mind’s cool edge,
I wonder?
Sound of distant rain.
Sound of distant rain.
Something seems forgotten:
Cool emptiness,
A taste of sorrow.
A taste of sorrow
For no reason
That I know.
Mantra of compassion.
Mantra of compassion.
Wind and rain
Blowing away
Ephemeral things.
—-
A CAST FOR WORMS
Well better and betterer.
Words for worms!
( Diet of Worms?).
Worm world.
Worm holes.
Cast about, Charles Darwin
( worms, his first love).
Lumbricus terrestris.
The name itself
Segmented, wriggling.
Beneath us all.
We, at last,
Their own dinner.
Earth to earth,
Tasting earth,
Making earth,
Loving earth.
Our Masters,
Squirmy worms,
Fast food,
Slow food,
Love food.
—–
ART OF POETRY
This hybrid birth,
a form of archaeology,
digging as science,
the science of digging,
the art of concealing and revealing,
building and collapsing, that is ,
constructing,
hybrid construction,
a constriction of possibilities,
a constraining of maps,
quantum thisness and thatness,
leaving more out than in,
making a point,
missing any other view,
poetry: the straining for meaning
without even pretending success,
e.e.cummins and e.e. goins,
a vowel,
a vapour,
a string of pearls,
words making doors,
doors opening,
sutras,
stitches,
hints for hunters…..
—
ROBIN
Looking back:
The world-
Bright, cocked eye
—-
GRACE
A small thing
Is not the same
As an inconsequential thing.
A loud voice
Is not the same as
A voice to be followed.
In one second,
In less, even,
The world can be born
Or can disappear
In front of our eyes.
Each person made afresh
Each to see what can be seen
What can be sung.
No wrong notes
If we do not know the tune.
We shall diminish and wither away
Jumping to conclusions.
Falling skillfuly
Is called flying.
Stumbling elegantly
Is called dancing.
Moving gracefully
Is called living.
—–
PERCEPT
Plum saké.
Too much
Slurs the mind
—-
METRE
It has presence and voidness.
It has frozen processes,
exited time,
become apt, concrete,
paradoxically gone.
Here
and both there and elsewhere,
but only inside
does it play a tune.
Lithophone,
bone music,
skeleton key.
Words Nest
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, boundaries, commentary, cosmologies, creation, edges, endings, existence, identity, Poetry, psychology, reply, words, writing on February 21, 2016| Leave a Comment »
But ‘we’ is not circled.
We have no edge ( though we think otherwise)
(though we think we think).
We think beginnings and endings,
we think words, breath, silence, breath,
intake the other, exhale the other.
cannot remember any moment beyond
a circumscribed horizon, cannot, even, the dreams,
nor the memories, for sure (was it, was, was it so, was it not?)
There are, of course, clues.
Vagrants, with a certain mildewed smell,
mutter slewed directions, their demon-bright eyes.
(but those we shun, as shadows,
as churchyards at night, as the insisting amoral voices in the mist,
peripheral, shuffled, ambiguous).
The long halls, the rooms, the chambers.
My dear Giordano, such equations, such equators.
So few and tired are the moronic habitual paths,
so broad the primrose paths
to Hell untrod, unstudied.
A rumour of damnation, like a roll of distant thunder,
a storm coming. Well, certainly, there is a storm coming.
From the edges to the centre, from the centre to the edges..
An ending ( of sorts).
And then it echoes around another’s skull.
Seed syllables.
The end of worlds.
The beginning of worlds.
—
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