Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ambience, art, haymaking, landscape, landscape photography, nature, photography, Poetry, skies, summer, Wales on July 22, 2015| 6 Comments »
Under a silent sky
Stretched with cloud,
Grasses loll green and pink and grey.
A firmament of birdsong
Curled, woven to sift shading green.
Tractors sigh and roar down the lanes.
Fields turned now and mown.
Stay quiet, stay still a while,
Hear how the river mumbles.
Fed we are,
Appeased by the width of things:
The deep caverned wood,
The slow, fine rains,
Flowers, now, of cloud.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, extinction, futures, garden, Irfon Valley, landscape photography, lanscape, Poetry, rainxlouds, storm, summer morning, The Epynt, uncertain futures, Wales, wind rising on July 3, 2015| 9 Comments »
A ROAR OF SUMMER
Of what shall we sing
In the ringing silence,
In the hushed ocean forest,
In the crow morning?
These ghost words haunt
The sway and shift,
The weight or lightness of moments,
The scented full and falling roses.
How can, how shall, the shifting pulse,
The dark and light cloud,
Stray highly, voiced onwards?
The dead sigh, roaring in the winds,
Rasp in the trees.
Their songs push and spin this world,
(As we might hope to
For ears that strain in summer dawn,
For futures and reasons and signs
To hope for goodness and good dreams).
The limp honeysuckle, the weaving bee,
A masked eternal glowing.
To be shriven and rid of this
Wasteland drab, dulled down leaden.
A golden storm is coming.
Hush. Summer’s engine.
The smallest cloud
Is greater than all this.
The light rain from the hills
Shall send us deep sleep.
The dreaming ear
Catch, but not hold,
An answer.
We are not what we were,
Nor shall be.
A pall, lifted.
Edges blur in oncoming rain.
We shall become slaked,
Unquestionably whole,
Purely hollow,
Of lightness and vast,
Perhaps,perhaps.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, landscape, landscape photography, nature, Poetry, summer solstice on June 21, 2015| 2 Comments »
SUMMER LONG
This elder splashed world, this rippled bourne,
A thousand round cream horizons
Stretching to light’s limit.
Sunlit words scatter on green tongues,
A bee wind, rose-scented, wavers.
This land breathes its hills and hollows,
The folding and unfolding of Time.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Abergwesyn, atmosphere, emerging, individuality(iillusion of), landscape, landscape photography, Llanwrtyd, merging, naming, Poetry, Pwyll Bo, River Irfon, spiritus loci, time and space, Wales on May 1, 2015| 2 Comments »
PWLL Y BO (continued)
There are streams and there are pools,
Gradients of speed, time and temperature,
A swelling and a cascade of moments.
Phenomena to clothe attention,
Voids to place memories within.
The paths of scent and heartbeat
Wander through landscapes,
Unseen but persistent:
They mould the seasons of emotion,
The tides of joy and despair
We think we seem to own.
How came the spirit to Pwll y Bo?
Born was it from scoured stone,
Water tongues speaking water language?
Inchoate become cadent rhythm,
Song become meaning become message,
Whispers mirrored, hollows filled.
There before, or only after, the wept
And lost wondering?
There is a quicksilver veil,
A something shimmer that,
Once touched, ripples forever.
So restless a wanderer,
The dew of his holiness on every meadow,
Churches sprang up in Dewi’s footprints.
This dream so unlike that dream,
Remembered backwards, becoming familiar:
His prayers, her tears, wellsprings,
Mouths of howling and hymns, stones with mouths.
Just so and more
The glow of set suns on warm earth,
A day begun and gone,
A day to come through long night.
We become our own pool, haunted,
Becoming vague, portenteous,
Oracular as thunderstorms.
Flowered feet, rooted stillness,
A mouth full of blossom.
His feet, our feet,
Her tears, our tears.
Owls in the valley,
Blackbirds amid cloud mists.
As every river knows,
We are not what we seem to be,
Not so steady, not so constant.
A permiable impermanence,
A vessel unable to choose its content.
To taste, shape and let go,
A flow of song, a chorus,
Cascades of little moments,
But enough to shape mountains,
Enough to flood oceans,
A silver rippled pool dissolving time and space,
A breathing landscape generating names.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Abergwesyn, ambience, Cambrian Mountains, landscape photography, mountains, Poetry, time, Wales, wind on November 8, 2014| 3 Comments »
Aeons of fast skies
Have worn smooth these hills.
Chosen colours have rubbed in,
Silence folded into sound.
These lacing waters,
These rock dark ribs.
A breath of rain,
A consideration of leaves.
A subtle exchange,
A movement towards earth.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, continuance, full moon, inheritance, landscape photography, night, November, Poetry, Powys, rain, the Eppynt, the past, Wales on November 7, 2014| 2 Comments »
KNIFE MOON
In the dark hills
Sons and daughters
Are learning how to kill,
Accurate remorselessness,
The wages of sin.
Down in the valleys
Translucent owls
Kill with God’s own
Gentle hand, guiltless
Down the hedgerows.
A knife moon glimmers,
Clouds severed
On a southern wind.
Out in the whispering,
Rainbow dark
The ghosts of shepherds,
Faithful dogs by their sides,
Long for the drifting flocks,
The steady roll of seasons.
Above the old forge,
The blacksmith’s arms
Aching with joy.
He dreams his cherry-red children,
A quenching thrust,
The soft pink blushing-
His sigh and smiling wife.
The warmth of our blood
We suck from the past.
Our heartbeat, passed on,
Down from when
Her eyes first opened.
We should be content
To simply sing our song
Then wait in silence,
Comforted.
Rain, again, on the glass.
Mist clings to the roots of hills.
The larch, tousled, twisted gold, leaning.
The grasses pale.
Warmth and good memory –
The past, our sweetest water.
A moderation for cold and bitter fires,
The burnished lies and stolen beauty.
—-
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Autumn, cloud, Freedom, glory, hillsides, joy, landscape, landscape photography, melancholy, nostalgia, Poetry, purpose, rain, ravens, reality, saints, the past, Wales, washpool on October 25, 2014| 4 Comments »
Those distant hillsides,
They are not velvet, not green,
But bog and rock, sweat steep
For all but ravens
(Whose feathers we might wish for,
For straight as an arrow, for
Wind carried swift joy,
For the soar of it, for the wide,
Open cry of it, for exultance,
For freedom from sins).
But down here, wind-sheltered,
Small, feasting on cold hopes,
Yearning for mist smoked valleys.
Did they watch from alder carrs
The washer girls, raw red hands
And tearful eyes, arching backs
And mournful, moaning songs?
Did they feel the Lord swell within them,
Those saints forbidden their fruits,
Wilderness dazed, sharp chinned,
Spear-eyed witnesses?
So many brave boys borne away,
Cudgeled and shivered in blood.
So many unborn, covered in autumn leaves,
And wept over.
So many promises split, broken open
(Nothing but spit and spite remaining).
So many reasons to slide into silence
Hoping for a glorious trumpet
And ’til then, peace.
Of the earth.
They are all of the earth
And know it not,
Or birch their blessings
For want of wit and a little love.
The pines roar
But bear no anger.
The pines cry
But have no sadness.
The rain sweeps down across the valley.
Leaves fall, air becomes sweetly bitter.
There is no blame, should you stay,
Should you watch.
Everything will seem as it is:
Sun through mist, a mellow round passing.
We shall melt as we are gathered together.
Melt and become another again.
One or two words (only) to pass through
The narrow straits of a few years,
Before they too will become singing silence.
This melancholy is a cloak for deeper joy.
This deeper joy, a cloak for melancholy.
All notes sung before the throne,
Chords of major and minor,
Diminished, augmented.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Autumn, Cambrian Mountains, Cefn Gorwydd, landscape, landscape photography, Poetry, Powys, the Eppynt, Wales on October 20, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Cefn Gorwydd ( pronounced something like ‘kev’n guroo eth’ ) is the hamlet where we now live. It is strung along a high ridge between two ranges of upland : old mountains- some of the oldest in the world- the Cambrians and the Eppynt, once home to druid saints and radical preachers…
CEFN GORWYDD
Here we all are, eight in a row
Sight pinned to one view.
Welcomed by distance
Absorbed, belonged, threaded in.
Suspended in swift airs,
Slowly turned, become diaphanous in thought.
Vague only to the roaring loggers
Mumbling down to valley woods,
Vague to the laboured city breath.
Worn thin and cherished
On the sight of light and land,
On the crisp edge and whispered mists.
Folded in and waiting.
The mountains’ round names
Seeping into stilled minds,
Burned purple, stained grey, rubbed in gold.
The layered edge a lilting song
A yearn for valleys curling north.
We are named, but little, a scattered thing
Tumbled together by this or that.
Laid out in a neat line
Patted down, a pattern of years.
We become monastic, an inward road.
Going and returning slow step by step
Between a fuller season
And a perfect prayer.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged allegory, art, awareness, bleating lambs, digital jiggerypokery, early morning, easter, Haiku-ish, landscape, landscape photography, meditation (definition of), morning, Poetry, sheep, Sound, spring, sun, vision, witness on April 17, 2014| 3 Comments »
EASTERTIDE
Morning sun.
Lambs and ewes.
In the shadows
Where frost dissolves:
Cool moved airs,
A glistening reflection.
A movement,
A stillness:
The space where thought
Had been.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, dragons, dream images, dreams, fairytales, folklore, fox lovers, Haiku, Haiku-ish, japan, japan landscapes, kirin, landscape, landscape photography, magatama, mountain monks, mythical beings, night, Poetry, rain, sleepless on May 31, 2013| 2 Comments »
MAGATAMA BLINKS
night rain.
slow breath, flared nostrils
of meditating samurai.
drunken skeletons,
clattering arm in arm,
splashing puddles.
rain passes right through them.
five-tailed white fox
rolls over, kisses lover
and creeps out to hunt chickens.
moon lies back,
shivers,
thinking of ocean beds.
calligrapher practicing
with invisible inks,
worlds destroyed and created.
yamaboushi
splashes down mountain path,
breathing rock and root.
five miles high,
dragons and phoenixes
look down on city lights.
crows shift and grumble
nests full of the stolen dreams
of small children.
magatama blinks
turning into a jade bird,
once then twice.
slightly fuddled,
thinking up names
for new brands of sake:
night rain,
samurai nostrils,
calligrapher’s surprise,
moonlit window,
animal seance,
dancing foxes,
shadow river.
poet weaves clouds,
farts, scratches,
remembers, forgets.
cloud scroll, cherry dark trunks.
hooves of the kirin
echoing in the valleys.
there is no magic outside
the mind.
there is no mind outside
of magic.
—-
simonhlilly 