Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, darkness, landscape, landscape photography, midsummer, night, Poetry, relativity, resonance, Wales on July 26, 2016| 3 Comments »
Midsummer night occluded.
Clouds rent slow and pale light.
One rolled silent tumble
Psalming more for gentle gods.
Rising, falling the hills
And through them threaded
Rising, falling hours of owls.
Weeping wonder
Well gone before done,
A brief flick and dreamer dreaming.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged chapels, landscape, Merhodism, photography, Poetry, Wales on July 25, 2016| 7 Comments »
CAPEL
1
Prayers fledged fluttering hungry to heaven.
Sins numbered, piled up on threadbare Sundays.
Precious is the clear sound of running water in high summer drought.
Clear-throated the hymns from the strong men drunk in praise.
These chapels set dour and grey against the weather God tests them with.
A pungent slow burning peat, this faith of farm work and school mistress.
2
Beyong the roof of human pride
Where Time slows, then stops, then turns to stone
(Mapping out the green bloom, the grey wheel of lichen breath)
Counting down the centuries ’til Eternity
There floats the height of the day and the meat crow dancing:
Poised upon life and death, the line they know so fickle and thin.
3
Drab with the spew of winter and as bitter as Jeremiah
Polished pine slows each musty sunbeam.
Bent arcing benches, each pew a hierarchy strained forward towards the throne,
Concentric jury leaning in to catch spark,
Dazzled is the ignition of the Word.
Burned up in glory or despair
(The cast-iron certainty, the stinging blister of guilt).
Now silence swallowed again, head bowed, the creak of doom summoned.
An enunciated slow pronouncement from other deserts
To a lost people, outnumbered, outmanouvred, dispossessed.
Gather ye in these bleak barns, ye Chosen lost and living yet.
Humbled together, take tea of Christ and God’s new supper.
A thin brew and be thankful for that: there is nothing else.
But better beyond the doors of Time and a hope of warmth and light
And just rewards for a drudge of work in mud and ice and rain,
And a voice of thunder and delight of which the organ sings,
so strong and sweet.
Notes: Wales is full of Non-Conformist Chapels. Every village had one, two, three, barn-like constructions looming over the lanes. Though they are dour and weatherworn now, the ones that have escaped becoming trendy private houses, can be very impressive, with wonderful wooden interiors. The photographs show the interior of our village chapel that originally dates from the 18th century. Gosen Capel is named after the Land of Goshen in the Nile Delta where the Hebrew tribes were settled so as not to upset the urban Egyptians. There is an irony here with the Old Testament histories and the plight of the rural poor of 18th and 19th century Wales. The egalitarian and popular nature of Methodism addressed the general populations in a way that the established churches had no wish to do, as they were supported and run by the educated and Anglicised gentry.
The ‘height of the day’ and the ‘meat crow’ in the second part are literal translations from the Welsh of the names for skylark and raven.
.
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 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.
