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Posts Tagged ‘landscape photography’

VOYAGE OF BRAN (1)

For what reason

Does she call the Raven King,

Arcing over the waters to a safe land?

She is wedded to the song, blossom and fruit,

Calling from afar.

No matter where we turn

The music is invisible.

It sinks so deep that we sleep

And see what we cannot see,

Wish what we cannot know,

Set sail in hope on small boats,

Our lives no longer holding us

On their certain courses.

Cast adrift to find joy,

To measure it and move on

As the visions shift

And prophecies grow stronger.

We, in turn, become more, and less,

Floating above, sinking below.

The Raven sung by love to rest.

And restless shall they be

With and without this world.

The taste of the tree,

Never quite enough.

Never seen again,

Melting into the music.

Oh! Silver Branch!

VOYAGE OF BRAN 2

I turn back to see the future,

To see what has been missed.

A silver rent sings across the sky,

Laughter that only a world can make.

I know we dream, but do not know how to awaken,

Or if it is wise.

Water birds are screaming lies,

Hearts sink deeper into permafrost.

The smudge of sneers on too many faces.

Truth that was struggling is dead.

Best not to speak at all.

Let the world in, though,

That impossible branch of song,

To new pathways, new biologies.

Look back.

Has it not all been written of before?

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BRYN

Bryn does not care

Whether it is ice or storm.

It does not care which angry voice

Strides the world to call for war.

It rises as it always has

Making a horizon towards heaven,

Feeling the deep, slow pulse of the seasons

That is the heartbeat of the earth.

Feeling the downward blessings of rain

That trickles its poetry through

Heather root and bracken arch.

Bryn, that is no name at all.

Singing itself to itself.

The throne, the Elders, the Hosts,

The shining voice, itself to itself.

Holding its counsel, abiding in silence,

Resting alone. An island above the mists,

Above the green glow, moving the stars

And giving each its shelter

In its own dark womb.

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CROOKED ONE

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Naked and moist am I

Burning with stars.

A sickle swept low

Severing chance.

Tongues silenced

Their excuses full,

The stories tedious,

Revealed as smoke.

One deep dark eye

That measures worth

Unblinking.

I bend slow and low

Gathering up and binding.

The web tied and untied

Between all things

That tastes of poetry

But is seed and blood.

Unmannered, hungry,

The world shall taste it

And be changed forever

We demean ourselves with pretty gods.

Lessen the glory of the pulse of life.

Fail to stretch beyond the familiar,

Discard the chance for conflagration.

A passionate average, a mean measurement,

A judicial lack of vision.

The wild world dances,

So we turn away to sink

To meagre cooling gruel from yesterday.

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It flowers with the breath,

Unfurls like a fern on the hill.

A cuckoo thing from somewhere else,

Desiring to belong, to be heard.

A voice rumbling with thunder,

A hiss of rain, a roar of wave,

A keening of curlew.

Nothing new, though,

nothing new can ever be said.

Before the flocks, before the engines,

Before the need to be somewhere else.

Kite and buzzard wheeled high above here.

On their upward soaring voice,

The voice of moving, warmed airs.

With vision open, fixed on hope,

Their hunger to remain.

Insistent is the voice of a silent land,

Holding those who care, to stand still a while to hear.

From the ground, and from beneath that,

It will rise up in its own time.

An uncurling, a reaching thread,

A line of a melody,

A translucent tusk of language.

In the waters, between field and wood;

In the moments, as cloud shades and passes;

Before certainty and after doubt;

A voice weighs and judges its own worth.

The verses shall all bow down, bright-browed.

Prophecy is the love-child of thought.

Lost souls, reborn, eager to take flight again.

The root of my tongue is locked to a syllable of light.

A spark electric, a leap between precipitous cliffs:

The long darkness of being, the long darkness of non-being.

A slim, swaying golden chain

Rising up to eternity,

Sinking to iron-cold oceans.

It shall not cease til it ceases,

Takes breath, and speaks again:

The whispering of rock and stream and soil.

A mother’s voice, never lost.

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UPLANDS 3.

(Wellsprings of the sea)

It all begins from here.

Next to nothing.

With thoughts unrooted, heady.

Pulled out and upward to limitless blue distances.

It begins moving on the edge of the sedge-grasses;

On the uncertain, treacherous ground;

On the coolness of the wind that carries the spice of death

Deeply within its folds.

It begins on the copper whale-backs of time,

Arcing out of the valley floors,

Carrying scorched stars and the ink of jet certainty

Into the unknown orbit of delivered time.

It begins with a line of trajectory,

An abandoning of nicety,

An allowance of ululating song

And purposeless joy.

It begins with bones, begins with nakedness,

Begins with scattered remnants and piled stones.

It begins with remembering and forgetting,

And a pure tenacity to continue on.

It begins with a circulation of tears,

A saturated weight desiring heft.

Waters moving together, ribbons rippling out of sight.

Peat, brown as beer, iron-rich, blood of earth.

It begins before sound begins,

before the names arrive.

And then the names carry it into our own belonging,

Mapped out and pinned down steady.

Here and here and here,

we dwelt, we smiled, we died.

Always there, hinting blue, lost beyond reach.

Always yearned after, hazily recalled.

Always one step further, one crest away.

Always more real than the real,

Freer than freedom, a weightless soul flight.

There, with the buzzards, with the kites.

There with the patient grumbling stone,

With the stumbling cloud, the hissing mist.

A dream, really, of how it was, of how it will be.

The uplands of heaven, void and singing.

(40)

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UPLANDS

1 (Near-eternal rules)

A perfect sky.

My tangled, old hands

forget themselves.

The valley dreams of the uplands and

The uplands dream of heaven,

and sing it so.

Easy it is to breathe its names

In the luscious sap

of hidden streams.

Easy it is to forget, though,

how to remain there,

Discomforted by continents of swelling air,

The sweeping veils of rain,

the unlikelihood of easy paths,

and how the weighted body

Yearns for flight

and how all thoughts always turn back

To the curling, dreaming bracken

and sullen silent stone.

The harsh gods gravitate here,

Born of flesh and born again,

with their horns and thunderheads.

Mud-spattered,

they hew and heft,

carve deeply the near-eternal rules.

Their language, as guttural, as singing,

as the falling crevices’ echo.

As the waters do,

melting away long millennia,

shaping bodies for breath

and for joy.

The deep folds of a planet’s shifting dream

Upon whose hunched shoulders

All the little things thrive.

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TALIESIN IN EDINBURGH

7

And shall I now sing the same sing

In the voice of sweet, sad Sorley?

Mugged on the streets by the muddle-headed,

The roar of impatient buses even in the cobbled ways

Hidden from any sunny truth.

The roar of modernity beating the brains

From the fallen doves of loveliness.

And the peace in the glens (where we lay

And forget even our names for a while),

And the peace of the hills (where we wept

With the rainbow promises of unlikely futures).

I shall walk with the ghosts down to the Grassmarket.

I shall nose into the deep pockets of Death

And await a sign, like Greyfriar’s Bobby,

And love it all, and lose it all – all the loud wanting,

All the measureless cloth and cut of status –

In the dusty bookshops down New Town way.

The hidden waters, unsuspected, below the gardens,

Below the pavements. The rock of ages

Staring down as it ever was: an emperor,

Purple in the dawn, where the pigeons quiver and coo.

It was mine. It was all mine, without taking one step.

Lungs filled with with barley malt from the breweries

There by Usher Hall. Seeping into every hope

On frosty mornings, the warm rusk scent of it,

Crossing the Meadows beneath whalebone arch

And cherry aisle. Old straight tracks

Converging on soot-black steeples.

Our slender grasp on life reaching for thistles

(And the harsh wind, a plaid of discomfort

Walking us into winter along the long grey cliffs

Of tenement and aspiring views).

Across the hills to the hills beyond,

And beyond that to the long dead hills

Dreaming in the Kingdoms of Fife

And the shining Forths.

Diesel chokes the throat at dawn chorus.

The sun, too neon, misses us out

And rises nonchalant.

The myth is always there, dressed in rags,

And us, looking down, scanning the pavements

For the wrong kind of gold.

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Pirate jay swings high through his dark wood,

Eye on falling gold.

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Day gives out early now, evening inks the cooling world.

The sun is warm, but shadows cool the slowing sap.

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What have we omitted in the long summer days?

What remains undone? What forgotten?

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Late roses fall, beans fatten.

Soon the frosts come, green pushing faint and failing.

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Gather in now, and wait for winter.

Inevitable increments, time winds it all up.

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Pirate jay, his eye accomplished,

Swings round the rolling decks of weather.

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The hills crowd darker dressed in cloud,

The woods velvet coal, a dreaming nest.

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This land, boy, is called history.

And she sleeps naked to the sky

And dreams of heroes.

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This land wades through its weather,

Wrapped in stories, warmed by its belonging.

We are gnats here for an hour or two

Dancing above an eternal pool

Reflecting the sapphire deep skies.

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This land stretches from shore to shore,

From sea to seabed, one continuous cloak,

A net of heart fires.

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IN THE TEETH OF WINTER.

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The sun, it is hanging in the holly.

It is tangled in the oak tree.

It feeds what creatures it might.

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The year, made of fruits, made of blossoms,

Is yet a cauldron of melting snow,

Barely born, barely breathing.

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Kindled and crackling, the day spits shadows.

We are all storytellers when we can do little else.

Telling of deceit and guile,

And how the great sun could be brought so low,

Our saviour bound, hostaged.

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A song to return our hopes.

A song to fend off darkness.

A song to teach the children

That all is not lost.

Though we fear it is.

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