Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Chinese poetry, landscape, landscape photography, Poetry, rain, summer, Wales, Wang Wei on July 7, 2016| 2 Comments »
a landscape for wang wei
the big hills
have gone visiting
the sky
in slanting rain
the green trees
dance and mime
incense rises
curving through all space
the window is a shrine,
an offering to silence
old men suck tea
and talk of distant troubles
i will paint in green
and grey and gold
a solitary bumblebee
wends its way
amongst comfrey
and wormwood.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, art, cliff face, gateways, landscape photography, otherwords, Poetry, portals, Preseli bluestone, rock surface, stars, Wales on June 28, 2016| 6 Comments »
Preseli Meditations (Rock Signs)
Eye
Is a palindrome,
As is
Sees.
Voices distant
Speak in tongues
From cracks in rock
Split open by light.
—
Split open
By light
A heaven swing
Through star roads.
A cloud hymn
And the sing of insects.
—
The sing of insects
Deep in winter.
Sunlight clicks
Its fingers.
One door opens.
Another closes.
—
Another closes
Creeps seeps
Through the
Butter of time,
The honey of space.
Dressed in bones
They come
Rolling down
With news
From heaven.
—
From heaven
Fingers prise
The smallest chink.
An eye blinks
The mirror
Cracked becomes
A door.
Backwards the
Paths lead
Backwards to
The beginning.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged forest, Haiku-ish, landscape, landscape photography, landscape.art, Poetry, senses, summer, Wales, woods on June 22, 2016| Leave a Comment »
Walking further than intended
A river breeze in the tree tops
And below, streams of birdsong.
—
The grasses are shooting green
But still in forest shade
The violets in full bloom.
—
A running stream
A cowslip sky.
At the forest’s edge,
The scent of green.
—
Deep in the woods
Violets bloom where no-one sees.
Perfected in themselves,
Complete within silence.
—
Allowed to breathe here
By the forest’s edge
This cowlip sky
A river wind in the treetops.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged forest, landscape, landscape photography, light, midsummer, Poetry, stars, summer, Wales on June 12, 2016| Leave a Comment »
CANOL HAF
(Midsummer)
a cowslip sky
above butter mountain.
the white waters whisper-
no rain for a week now.
the summer stars i have all renamed
and are become dear places i have loved.
and the faces that float smiling
as i sleep, shine warm as sunlight
in bee-blessed gardens.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancient yews, church, landscape, landscape photography, layered reality, Llanfihangelnantmelan, mythic place, Poetry, Radnorshire, stonecircle, time, Wales on June 8, 2016| 2 Comments »
The precinct of the Archangel
by the mill on a stream.
I remember it on a fast road
between the high red hills,
curling up, like a bow,
like a warrior’s cold, virtuous smile,
and circled there,
(as they are wont to do,
these fortresses of God),
bright as the rolling eye of an ox,
enclosed in gold, round and cursive on parchment,
certain and lofty as the eagle’s eye,
brushed by the winged feet of angels,
fast as swallows, lion-maned and roaring downwards.
A stream in righteous flood, founded and pierced
watching the long abeyance of old stones,
set to conquer and control in the name of an almighty
(who needs none of it, but will not, ever, say).
Perched above the ringed stones,
placed upon the circle, a squared house, holy upon holy,
holy with age, each forgotten, become green and softened,
their lichen-words married together,
one song become all together wrapped, and reaching trees
carrying the dead and their bones skywards.
Ring on ring, ground grain and chaff-free
by chapped, sinewed sure hands of time
and the endless flow of its river
and the grinding together echoing amongst the hills,
all heathered and blessed with sheep.
The fast road does not see but always curves past.
A million herded feet, a thousand whispered wheels
roaring past leaving this hushed wonder.
Circled circle, reiterating its roundness,
a mapped and renumbered holiness.
Tree and stone and church, the eternal stream,
the mill grinding out stars.
All, prisoners of patience guarding each the older guardians.
Tree and stone and church, where the dead congregate in their branches,
whispered in the long winds, the setting suns.
A pale sun rolls along the fields, a pale and pellucid fraction of eternity,
named and mapped in a honey tongue
pronounced slow and certain on a fast road between high red hills,
there for all to see in the green evening,
its cool, green shade, its many circled names,
its deep and darkening bed.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged a new dreaming., beauty, change, continuance, death, grief, landscape, landscape photography, memory, Poetry, song for a dead friend, summer, transformation on June 4, 2016| 5 Comments »
A Season’s End
(Epitaph for Vicky)
we become more uncertain
and waver by the day,
our past melting behind us.
a change of season, inevitable.
where now that warm pulse?
that voice? that presence?
altered a little into sunlight,
into a vast, bright landscape,
into a bigger heart.
for there will always be beauty,
though no one promised joy
without sorrow.
we have melted into summer
wrapped in cooling green shade.
and some of us have not returned.
here then, the blossom heart of hawthorn,
here, a cowslip sky and creamy elder.
in the forest still are one or two violets
and the sound of running water,
and the droop and sudden flash of bluebells.
the sigh of swallows and the cuckoo misted valley.
where she walks now is all beauty,
and calm, and easy forgetting.
a summer that shall come upon us all.
and a long day, and a warm evening,
and a long, silent, singing night.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Abergwesyn Commons, architecture, Cambrian Mountains, cosmography, dwelling, farmhouses.landscape, Gaston Bachelard, houses, inner space, landscape photography, longevity, Poetics of space, Poetry, Rgandirmwyn, Troeddyrhiw, Wales on May 27, 2016| 2 Comments »
View From A Mountain Garden ( part)
2
Of ghosts,
a splendid architecture of ghosts
Do we make our habitations.
From the heart and sinews of seas and forests,
From the ground-down aeons of mountain muds,
From river stone, from oak shadows….
this waiting house,
a world reconstrued, once
laid low to dust, now breathed
and built up once more…
a nest for sighs and whispers
wrapped in birdsong
wrapped in leaf…
making no choices, though shaping all.
says nothing, mother and grandmother,
mam a mam-gu of the land.
dressed in their wild and neatly stitched green lawns,
their tidy beds, their hasty gates and tumbled yards…
they all rest in their own weight,
watching the come and go.
an anchor for time and space,
intimation, imitation, even, of eternity.
our own cosmography outliving us….
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ambience, art, blessing, bodhichitta, consciousness, image, landscape photography, light, metaphysics, moonlight, night, peace, Poetry, thought, transcendence on May 24, 2016| 2 Comments »
SWIMMING MOON
swimming moon
and floated in light
this sorrowful world
surrenders to peace
a few hours bathed clear
in blue shadowed silence
thought waters
white, rippled
reflecting one perfect smile
all will settle homewards,
belonging
never having left:
a moment only,
forgetting completion.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ambience, art, landscape, landscape photography, mind, mystery, night, Poetry, rain, sleeplessness, spring, time on May 21, 2016| 3 Comments »
A Landscape Illuminated.
It is the drift between the breath of in and of out,
the fleshy petalled night a poison,
and an endless moonlit rain.
In gardens at very least, the green
will muscle upwards a brief month or two
from cuckoo’s bell and sighing swallows
to the ticking, scratching melodious crickets.
In hills, now, flakes of gold are falling snow silent
and the thin ghosts ever crying for justice
in the long, cold, blue shadows.
We dim with daisies a glimmer haze
And drop of hawthorn goddess,
scented and mean on red-folded air.
Sliding, we are sliding, uncertainly
whether up or down again, the long drip.
Time it is dripping, invented, named, measured
and wasted away as if dawn and sunset were not enough,
and the stars forever clouded and lost in mystery, as they are.
Adrift and turning, rocked gently, dismally declined.
Warmth slow escaping, longing for another somewhere
with bees and lilac and long, painless sleep.
A landscape illuminated, kissed in light,
unburdened with consequence, unfolded.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, dreaming, drovers, landscape, landscape photography, names, naming, Poetry, Powys, Wales on May 10, 2016| 4 Comments »
Catalogue
rivermouth of the man-servant
house of the councillor
ridge road by the forest’s edge
the abbot’s land.
the dark stream and the winding river
dipped between the domed land
sprinkled with enclosures of saints,
tonsured walls on green tumped hilltops.
the washpool, wolf’s leap, devil’s staircase.
thr whistling ghosts of drovers and the
warm breath panting of their dogs.
stories of cobbled streets and a wild language
far away.
with gold of many kinds,
they return to the long silence here
and the starlit grazing
of sheep at peace.
simonhlilly 