Posted in Uncategorized, tagged a certain Welsh Dylan, art, landscape photography, Poetry, Wales on March 7, 2017| Leave a Comment »
The words
of the sea
Roaring drunk
And glorious
in endless sunlight.
He has squeezed through
regardless,
Touching the soon
And the many.
He knows that
Poetry is
not the words.
Words
are what remains
When poetry has flown.
Flown like a bomb,
like a sunrise,
In all directions,
too great for human kind,
But not the soul,
singing, silent, watching
In endless birth,
the reason beyond itself.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged burial ground, Cefn Gorwydd, deep ecology, landscape photography, life, Poetry, synergy, transformation, Wales, yew tree on February 16, 2017| 2 Comments »
Gathered In
There in its branches
All the dead are gathered.
And there they sing,
Bright as ivy berries
Whilst angels, like winter wasps,
Sip grateful and murmur
a psalm of houses.
There is this, and nothing but this:
A gathered slow change
From one, shared endlessly with the other,
Wrapped and stretched,
Wriggled and feathered.
A rope of souls arcing
The deep between lonely stars.
And the slow pools,
And the fast river of seconds
Washed away-
Breathed in, breathed out,
And in the silences between:
The wind in the dry leaves
And the creak of limbs
Tangled from rusted iron rails,
And shattered blooms of stone
And words in an old tongue:
Here lies, in memory of, the memory,
The memory itself.
One that was, gone now beyond crumbled edges,
Melted skin, up to the snowline,
Down to the river pastures.
Gone to the hairy down-soft snakes of ivy;
The hard, blood-thin flakes of yew;
The bitter tang of elder, caught right there
At the back of the throat;
The delightful bruised scent of ground-ivy
And the small violet day.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Cambrian Mountains, distance, Elenydd, landscape photography, Poetry, silence, space, uplands, Wales on February 8, 2017| 2 Comments »
Sunlight and whispers,
Bright rolling silence.
There is no confusion here:
All things fall fearless
Against the movement
And the stillness
Of hours and their dust.
Footsteps all forgotten
(Puddle, pool, stream, river)
Nothing but the distance of the past
And the distance of the future
(And the skylark remembering both).
The diagonal slide of sun and moon and stars,
Tides of light and shade,
The constant abrasion of the wind.
It hardly breathes, so still it is
In its rising and falling distances.
The silent rolling hills of heaven.
These uplands spread out
Like God’s own hands
On the first Sunday,
Sun-warmed skin stretched pale
Over rippled knuckles,
Bone resting quiet,
Muscle and tendon singing.
Sky-touched, the first moments,
Cloud thoughts, the pale waving grasses,
This click of warming rock.
—-
The Elenydd is the old name for the central uplands of Mid Wales, known as the Cambrian Mountains. The southern border is effectively the Irfon Valley, where I live, though in actual fact the valley is bordered on its other edge by the Mynnedd Epynt, a very similar landscape.
The Elenydd is a very ancient mountain range worn down to a high bog and grassland plateau cut deeply by streams and rivers
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Imbolc, landscape photography, Mid Wales, morning, Poetry, the seasons, time, Wales, Winter on February 5, 2017| 5 Comments »
Time slides as the seasons slide,
One into the other.
As the sun slides and the moon slides.
Time slides as the days slide,
Toppling over and over,
Rolling as the sun rolls, as the stars roll.
Garn Goch is covered in cloud again.
A slow drift, wordless love.
Seeds of rivers, seeds of seas,
Collecting on the stiff sedge
That lodges between the tumbled rock.
All slides on,
A smooth falling dance
Through winter, through spring,
Through summer.
A green slide and a grey slide,
Sun and rain.
A slow smoke rises, offered.
River mist: opaque as snow, radiant.
And the calligraphy of oaks.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, cold morning, dawn, landscape, landscape photography, mist, mountains, nature, Poetry, Wales, Winter on December 31, 2016| 14 Comments »
Ice Breath
Is it not true
That it is always the past
We burn to keep ourselves warm?
The young sun
Is on the tops now,
The deep valleys shadowed,
The mists let go, rise and melt away.
One slow hawk
Skims the treetops.
The cold, still sky
Has yet to choose its colour.
Ice will soon breathe,
relax to water,
Struck by the
warm weight
of light.
Those
that have survived
the night
Will stir
and sing.
—
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 Abergwesyn, art, landscape, landscape photography, Mid Wales, Poetry, rivers on December 17, 2016| 1 Comment »
The long song
1
Pwll Bo, where the waters swirl the colour of trout,
As brown as deep sunlight and the taste of peat.
Shadowed is the heathered hue ( whose voice
White as lightning sings to the oldest of things,
Though few may know it except the ghosts
Of wanderers lost and found by starlight,
And the fastness of owl-bright silence
And the stillness of hills in their watchfulness.)
Pwll Bo and then the Washpool and then on,
Down to the church and then the town.
Everything murmurs in its own language.
The river’s accent rushes from wild to soothing
To wild again.
Clouded, the eye of this precinct night
Lost in dream that seems to be remembrance, but is not.
A doppler drift of slow, utterly endless forgetting.
2
Singing the long song
Pwll Bo roars white and whispers.
Water turning hills to soil.
3
Pwll Bo
Spirit song
Mountains to soil
Sunlight to trees
Water to life.
Weaving sound
A throat of rock.
White, roaring water.
Hollowed rock
A mouth of song.
Thunder whispers.
Sunlight and shade.
A rivered voice.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged annwfn, archetypes, art, daemons, debris, dreams, Earth Mind, Ideal, landscape photography, mind, Otherworld, Poetry, recycling, Secret Commonwealth, sentience, waste products on December 5, 2016| Leave a Comment »
White with snow are the hills on the horizon.
The rivers are quiet, the pools frozen.
Clouds from the north taste bitter cold sunrise.
The deep, dark, breathing earth accumulates to itself,
As if the threads and shreds of shared sentience
Net down the long years and become soaked
With drip and ceaseless dream, each wish and ache
And spark of memorable brightness,
Catalogued, compacted, savoured, saved.
And with these do they clothe themselves: in a world’s memories
And thus, learn to speak in howls and long whispers,
An aesthetic without emotion, a dance only, a game, a chess board,
A gwyllbwyll, a ritual that is not quite imitation nor mirroring
But has its own exquisite golden reason,
A long dreaming sublimation of spent and careless thought.
All these cobwebs and leaves, they are truly
the only gold to be cherished.
The damp and fusty decay of life thrown off,
Carefully considered and gathered again for feasts of kings and angels
And dark giant forms that have no concern for any future,
but nurture the past cradled in deeper woods, rocked in song,
Draped in arcane languages, swung on sunless, starless seas,
Shattered on mirrored starry pools and fountains.
A moment too slow for this world’s water
( a dream of even clearer water, a blood clear river,
a serpent spiral of cool life,
Silver water, perfect loom of water,
eternal life giver, rock cooled, cave silent,
Tremulous with distant footfalls, distant light.)
More real than the real, more real than time,
more present so it is squeezed between each chink
Of time and space, our substratum, our mother matter,
our folded vast and black pinions,
Our beautiful storm, our glory and tragedy,
our mulch of words.
To where all words sink and their images too,
to reform, re-loved beautiful monsters, free from doubt,
Unburdened of guilt, violent and innocent,
purely, demurely selfish and sharing the virtues of edge and shadow.
Ploughed deep in the dark trenches,
the midnight river boat of sun and moon,
sung with choir of gods and stars and lascivious,
long limbed goddesses born for pleasure.
They will swallow us all, open up and consume,
become fecund and full and birth us over and over,
their lovers named and unnamed, loved and laid to rest.
The smallest of things, a feast of passion most holy.
Most holy the earth and its names,
most holy the mystery beneath us,
the mirror within us, the eyes, the feral eyes,
the hungry eyes that look back
and do not ever, ever, look away.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, bards, landscape, landscape photography, Poetry, tradition, Wales on November 19, 2016| 2 Comments »
Hills behind
There are hills behind the hills,
Words behind the words.
Clouds of understanding billow up
Then dissolve to fog.
The old words, the mountain words,
The river words –
No matter how fast you move,
You can never catch up with them.
The old words,
They have the deepest roots.
We sit by the forest edge,
Sky and grasses and the sallow dell.
Starlings shift and rise
From field to field.
Their patterns weave small tongues,
Bright eyes.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged annwfn, art, Autumn, bardic, deep ecology, druidic metaphor, First Branch, landscape photography, Mabinogion, Otherworld, Poetry, Pwyll and Arawn, samhain, symbiosis, Welsh myth on November 1, 2016| 2 Comments »
Samhain in Annwfn
Transgression by assumption.
You have taken what does not belong
By assuming everything you see here
Is yours by right.
Taking what is mine
You shall take my role and duty.
You shall by this become completely me
(And yet not), and I you.
Enter the deep and see perfection
And its flows.
Twilight woven through with gold.
A brocade worn thin and transparent,
Sky-patched, redolent.
A more perfect dream
Sunk into the depths.
As if eyes had been staring at the sun:
Now everything veined red-gold,
Too dark and too bright to see,
An inner burning light that dims the world,
Makes sense of flickers and ghosts,
And tongues of fiery liquid language
Scarce understood but lascivious.
Skin turned fallen leaf, crunched,
Made liquid, sucked up,
A new wine burning with blushed passion
Or so it may seem.
The skill here
Is not to weigh nor judge
But to lick the lightest air and breeze
And swim undisturbed, unseen
According to most fluid laws.
Dreamed but not dreaming,
A metaphor eternal, echoing.
There is, and never was, a thing made single,
Nor one made so especial
It could not be reflected endlessly
In midnight pools.
And all this
Only a beginning.
A recalibration.
A falling leaf
Slowly spinning.
A kiss.
A message.
It will be dust in the morning.
But the ache of memory:
That will be the always hidden gold.
