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 art, landscape, moments, phitography, Poetry on June 2, 2016| 2 Comments »
A LITTLE MADNESS
What else should we call it
but a continuity of forgetfulness?
A tumbled consequence
carried away with itself.
A singing river stumbled over stones,
worn down, meandered, lost in slowing meadows.
A skylark hovered in boundless blue sky,
bobbing above folded, dreaming summers.
A veda, a hymn though, still.
An ornament, they say, a precious jewel
winged with inevitable waking into timeless ways.
The proscribed drunken rambling of slow-breathed,
shine-eyed hermits brought wisdom in broken cupped skulls
by lithe, smiling dancers.
The tongue-tasted words, nectar-sung words,
scribbled on leaves in golden letters, bright as fire.
A little madness, a note held sustained far, far too long,
escaping reasonable doors of breath,
But going onward nonetheless.
A wonder, really, that we do not all, forever,
die of laughter.
Always so tragic and beautiful
this fragrant thorned life is.
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.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, awareness, being, Cambrian Mountains, change, clouds, distance, Irvon Valley, landscape, landscape photography, light, photography, Poetry, purpose, Wales on April 23, 2016| 2 Comments »
Looking towards Carn Wen at evening.
To watch the pass
of light and dark
and how they each
shape these hills, this way and that,
is all I wish now to do.
we live, we die
as the distances reveal themselves
then vanish with the pass of a cloud.
if not to fill our time with beauty,
if not to see the world as it becomes us,
then what?
a flicker of pain, a flight upwards of joy
and the rolling of light in the valleys.
what other instruction
for a being of discernment?
what other lesson but this?
and to count the days
’til cuckoos and swallows.
and to keep to the constellations
of sheep and the openness
of lambs.
we shall end again soon enough.
peace is here
and it is sufficient for a whole universe.
and to watch the clouds pile
and drift at the setting sun.
and the smell of dew
on grass.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, consciousness, continuance, dreaming, impermanence, landscape, manifestation, meaning, morning, mortality, nature, painting, Poetry, reality, represention, storytelling, Wales on March 13, 2016| 2 Comments »
ARTEFACT
We come and go one by one,
or in twos and threes,
waking, sleeping from dream to dream,
handfuls of dust cast heavenwards, taking shape,
then falling back to settled earth. Bubbles, thoughts, whispers.
Birdsong in a pearl-still dawn.
All day in this small green field,
in its tangled bare hedges,
in its edge of trees,
in its deep grasses, the birds
flit and feed, pause and fly off.
All day the sunlight picks out the distant slopes,
the forests, the valleys.
And they, too, come and go with mists
and clouds
and drifts of rain.
For months now I have been working the canvases,
(for people do so like a view to hold on to,
one so dear to them, one they do not have,
a way through the mute walls,
to remember an opening out, a beyond,
a distant something).
Against its nature to drip, against its habit to mix and merge,
against my own fingers’ wish to sweep and gesture.
A discipline,
the tying down of an illusion,
confection for tongue and eye.
A sweet minded moment, an ache of forgetting.
The life of itself, a liquid thing,
to be constrained so, to process
as a stately, well-dressed thing.
Not just a swirled, delightful, mute moment.
A meaning. A purpose identified. The monitoring of the familiar.
As if. As if.
As if there were a story.
As if there were a careful, structured tale.
A small beginning, a once, a long-ago.
Through wild, thorned paths and fog and frost
to a final end so careful balanced.
A just so.
An as it is.
Something to leave behind.
Something to say.
More than a rise and fall.
More than a raven’s cry across the valley.
More than a blackbird in the cool dawn air.
More than a drift of mist above a hidden river.
More than a rise of trout as the gnats dance on light.
The fire is lit
and it must be fed ’til nightfall.
Then, untended, it will die down,
become silent.
That smooth black,
silk-dark soot:
a hand-print,
a fingerprint on a cave wall:
we are here,
dreaming.
And we found a way through.
—-
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birds, corvus species, crows, Haiku, Haiku-ish, kites, landscape, late winter, nature, Poetry, Wales on March 9, 2016| 9 Comments »
Early morning frost
Wind beneath the raven’s wings
A nice cup of tea.
—
The first drops of rain
Three kites skim the valley floor
Their cries long and thin.
—
In the tall oak
by the chapel door
A gang of jackdaws
telling smutty jokes.
They have no care
for the slow sermons
of crows,
Nor the ponderous theology
of glint-eyed
ravens.
simonhlilly 