This sudden moment slows.
Wingbeats in the mist.
One drop of rain, then another.
—
Posts Tagged ‘landscape’
One drop (haiku)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Haiku, Haiku-ish, landscape, Poetry, summer rain, Wales on September 17, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Leaving Llangammarch
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, death, landscape, landscape photography, Mid Wales, mortality, peace, Poetry, the dead, Wales on September 15, 2019| Leave a Comment »
LEAVING LLANGAMMARCH
Who would choose to leave this Llangammarch
Wrapped in birdsong on a warm and sunny morning?
Who would lift their eyes from the glistening waters
Draped with alder shade and grasses?
Throughout the houses it has now the soft hush of loss.
The hollowness of a hollowed name, a rehearsal of memories.
Llangammarch threaded between wood and waters;
An easy confluence neat folded against the green grey heights
of Epynt and its sighing skies, its distances tasting of blue.
Except those who tend the dead ( the small things singing), no one lives on Epynt now.
It is a roofless, empty house, shadowless, and singing winds.
Perhaps it is there our departed go, congregating to watch the unfolding world,
At ease and in peace, soothed by a longer perspective on sorrow and joy.
Who would leave Llangammarch, warm and dreaming?
Those with dreams urgent and golden;
Following the light upstream,
the open skies, the warm winds,
the curlew berating heaven.
A floating world, a breath away.
One breath away.
—
Shining World
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, bardic stuff, coexistence, landscape, Mannanan, metaphysical cosmology, Otherworld, paradox, Poetry, symbiosis, Welsh myth on September 4, 2019| 5 Comments »
SHINING WORLD
(MANANNAN’S ISLE)
Glass-smooth the sea,
Its light a silk knife
Whispering sighed names:
The hidden islands.
Bathed in rainbow words,
There and not there,
Not to be focused upon.
To be rolled upon the tongue,
Tasted and weighed,
Melted to a honey meaning.
Sung in fickle keys
Near impossible to memorise.
A world away, here between breaths.
Suffers none to name it
Nor clothe it in anything
Other than it is.
Unknown by knowing,
Reached by rudderless boat
Through mist to sunlit sands.
Their mouths say one thing,
Their eyes another,
Their hands dance around,
Gestures in hypnotic weave.
Hope is not there,
Nor is it elsewhere.
Those who want shall
Never be satisfied.
To remember perfectly
And to forget perfectly,
And to continue, nonetheless.
That is how to belong there.
From the lands of eternal dreaming
We seem here to vanish continually,
Swept away,
The tides of joy and pain,
Doomed and mortal.
But without time
What can be done?
The perfected go nowhere,
Nothing accomplished.
Sun and moon and stars hold still,
All roads vanish in the mists.
Wordless songs.
We dream of them,
They dream us,
The in and out of breath.
A golden chain,
Link needing link.
We must dance together.
—
From Tre Taliesin to Ynys Las
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, bardic, landscape, landscape photography, Poetry, Taliesin on August 6, 2019| 2 Comments »
FROM TRE TALIESIN TO YNYS LAS
1
We climbed the ladder road,
The wind road, peeling away distance,
Letting it drop curled below us
And the wide river mouth talking
Of nothing but the past it has known,
And the sands blowing snakes of words
Across the scoured wet flats
Where the land once was – a safe
And green world sloping down to sunlit seas,
Where now are tiny fishes and wriggling worms
And the hush of marram and the high wail of gulls.
2
That river has a poet’s mouth –
Meandering and easy, opening out to sunlit distance
The glory of horizons and a sweep of dangerous current.
I have sat on Taliesin’s grave
Gnawing his white knuckle bone
Between my teeth, tasting the marrow of bitter truth:
That there are no primary domestic bards here
But only the drone of tractors bailing sweet green hay
And thin clouds carded by wind over the bay towards Borth,
And a lazy river snaking between wavering weeds of slap-brown mud.
Swung between the rugged and the banal, lost on thin white roads.
These words, at best, are dry-stone, held together by habit
And a certain gravity that is the stubbornness of breath.
Look out, look down from here, from the throne, from the tomb,
From the seat of recognition ( the sword pulled out, the sword sheathed again).
We long for peace and call for peace,
Knock on the doors in the hills for our admittance
But have forgotten the password and cannot satisfy the gatekeeper
With our unconvincing boasts of embroidered skill.
It is not to do with pronunciation,
It is not to do with truth.
It is the quality of our hunger,
The rain-sated weight of bland inheritance,
The mouthed repetitions.
But let that go. Let the wind sweep it clear,
Let the estuary throat sweep away the salt bitterness.
The world is bright, regardless. It shines in the sun, regardless.
And the song remains, regardless.
Though no one hears it.
—
Led away
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged horizon, landscape, light, Poetry, summer, Wales on July 24, 2019| 5 Comments »
The passage of time and the passage of light
And the drift of thought.
Cloud cover comes and goes,
A brightening and a darkening.
Birdsong and other rivers.
A convergence and a dissipation.
They all return to the one horizon,
Led away by song and by the rolling hills.
—
The Hedges
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged landscape, landscape photography, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, Poetry, seasons, summer, Wales on June 24, 2019| 3 Comments »
THE HEDGES
The hedges hawthorn foam.
Precise time ceased and waiting.
A mist to smudge everything not near.
And a blue cool watchfulness
Before slow, large drops of rain.
Hills, and hills behind the hills, we see.
Hills and hills in the heart of the land.
Inch by inch they choose green
Over wan winter brown.
Inch by inch they swell and sing
Sated with descending arcs of summer stars
—
Dhrupad 23 (green)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Aberedw, blossom, hills, landscape, landscape photography, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Poetry, spring, Wales on June 9, 2019| 1 Comment »
DHRUPAD 23 (green)
Look now green green now.
Even green in the hills, the high cold hills
with their hearts of stone, sniff the green the tips of bracken there
amongst the old debris pink and brown,
so many cold nights
and winds and slow days of so slow heavy rain.
By the thin rivers and
the fast streams the sedges green and growing
that were hog bristle brown, dead and belligerent and wan wan wan.
And even
the clouds even the clouds
so low and slow and fast, tinged now with
a certain green a certain glow a reflected green, a green smile the world
knows
once frosts are gone and the larger days and the cowslips
foaming over the roadsides in drooping cream bee buzzing delight
now.
The pink grey empty slopes over Aberedw peppered
all peppered with hawthorn white and creamly perching there,
a crown for each moment each outcrop tonguing scented air
pert as hounds bright eyed and keen for sunlight warm and honey
smooth.
A green green breakfast it is now
for the hungry hills,
the hungry hills.
—
Offering of the Mandala
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged landscape, meditation, offering, Poetry, prayer, Wales on June 2, 2019| Leave a Comment »
OFFERING OF THE MANDALA
Mountain breathes out.
I breathe in.
Still air.
Sky turning slowly blue.
A wood pigeon sings its call to prayer.
An offering of hawthorn blossom sprinkles the valley.
There is nothing that cannot be healed.
Nothing that cannot be lost and found.
–
Dhrupad 22 ( by the sea)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beaches, dhrupad, landscape, music verse, Pembrokeshire, Poetry, seaside, sunny days, sunny May, Tenby, Wales on May 23, 2019| 4 Comments »
DHRUPAD 22 (by the sea)
See see how it is how it is how the air is honey, honey now
and these clouds of milky love that drift so drift drift so slow sometimes,
so slow so so hard to see in which ways, where where do they go
they come they go so slow.
A sea too that breathes slow in sighs and sighing
coming going sighing shores. The waters turquoise,
turquoise sliding violet on violet with hardly a ripple, with hardly a wave.
At its edges the colour goes the colour goes to distant distant shine of light, the tiny far off cliffs of Gower, a radiant line of sand,
and birdsong from somewhere by here somewhere
in the cliffside blowsy bending bushes.
We are pulled down here funnelled down here
by a sighing wish for beauty, drifting down to the coasts drifting like sheep do in sunshine down down to the coasts.
And our eyes gathered up, turning and returning to this horizon this same singular steady horizon.
All the painters all the poets hunting beauty to become beauty to feel beauty, the weigh of it and know it.
A fly buzzes buzzes bounce bouncing off window glass, to get through to get through to get into that beyond that beyond to pass the invisible no,
to join the eternal, free and spacious world.
The cliffs here, like the hills of home move from bluff to smudge to etched deep etched edge with time and tide and sliding light,
though nothing can push this horizon from its certain line, nothing stop our eyes ever drifting over there.
Our own whisper thoughts slow slow then cease (almost), and music, even, except the breath of the wave of the wave the wave the wave on the folded bays out of sight below the cliffs here
bouncing green with sea kale and valerian, salt sweet and grasping each sandy earthed crevice there.
The poets, the painters, all the lovers all the lovers,
the long roads, even, longing for endings and sunshine and salt sweet salt tang, we all, all drift, drift down
funnelled by love funnelled by this beautiful distance
lying in sunlight signed by a moon in the drift drift blue slow blue sky roof the long slow day drift in the curved quiet bays
and the arc of sand and the nibbled shore
and the smiling houses all lined up
to see to see
to see
and be
within it
all.
—
—
By the Sea
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Dinbych yr Pysgod, landscape, photography, Poetry, seaside, sun, Tenby, tides, Wales, weekend break on May 21, 2019| 1 Comment »
—
Two nights by the sea
Matching our breathing to the slow waves.
Hardly a cloud to darken the waters
From this smiling turquoise.
A half moon nudges the tides
Wearing footsteps away, the miles of sand.
Thoughts drift to the one horizon,
But do not ever wander far.
We meander around the old town walls
And back and forth,
Like painters touching a near complete canvas,
Almost perfectly satisfied.
simonhlilly 