Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, becoming, being, belonging, breath, BreconBeacons, Caer Carmarthen, deep ecology, enduring, evolution, landscape, landscape photography, life, Poetry, transmutation, Wales on September 11, 2015| Leave a Comment »
THOU ART
this earth
breathed upon
(the warm breath
of love and lust)
holds for a little while
in wonder
then retreats
to sighing earth.
its breath
passed on.
a whisper
in the forest,
a gust
below the rocks
and the high heather.
where the kites
and ravens wheel.
and the sun and stars,
too, kindled, embers,
by that offered air.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, landscape, Llangammarch, photography, Poetry, St. Cammarch's church, Wales on September 8, 2015| 1 Comment »
ENCLOSURE OF CONFLUENCE
The dead roll and slip downhill
Chasing their bouncing heads,
Big as cheeses, down to the midstream island,
Fish-shaped and floundering in summer shallows
(it not having rained a whole day yet).
A hullaballoo choired
By the black flung jackdaws
Skimming the tiles, sound bouncing
Off the echoing bells.
Low droop the days.
How jolly the dreams
Of froth and fuschia bud
Dripping red from garden walls.
So quiet as to hear every noise,
Here in the round mouth of eternity:
The splitting rock, the lichen creep,
The self-taught letters silent mouthed
Born such and such, died such and such,
A good day ended, ne’er forgot,
Bearing many loving children.
Where now our utter quiet and wild-eyed saints?
Perched on their hills, blessing miraculous waters,
Passionate for the bigness of God,
Spread winged and leaping
Into skies of echoing praise.
Turn serpent-like to the steady pilgrimage,
Our certain roads,
These small piled eggs of pure white quartz,
The sign and signature for hard days
And steady hearts – an offered hope.
All here where two streams mingle,
The inner and the outer path.
A melancholy garden, neat kept and bordered.
Beyond the quiet lanes and clean swept steps
Another place altogether
Blowsy and careless with candles and dust,
An accumulated pigment, sun faded.
The glorious stars, an ocean
Upon which a silver bowl
Of tipping moon
Will late, near dawn, arise.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, fear of the unknown, Haiku-ish, landscape, nature photography, Poetry, sensate perception, subterfuge, symbolism, the state of the State, the undefined, twilight, uncertainty on September 1, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Twilight now
no certain edge
no end nor beginning of it,
an inperceptible slide.
Colours smudge,
blood turns black
(its bitter colour)
lost in peeled shadow.
All ruins stir-
a swung memory,
tacit rhythm,
mumbled sight pitter-patters.
A moth wing trepidation
vibrating mica dust,
dew singed,
a collapse in certainty.
A heavenly moment
of relapse.
cascading inconsequence.
silent dice tumbled,
bounce and settle.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, diminuition, landscape, maps, Poetry, Powys, the past, Wales on August 29, 2015| Leave a Comment »
THE OLD MAPS
These threaded paths, it seems, fade first
As the stones are scattered,
hearths humped green and cold,
Byres split, lying sky open,
No more the warm breathed huddle.
No more the feet trampling bracken down the hill.
The roads, though, weave on, either greater or slighter.
They follow the slopes of land and hedge,
Over ford, under the woods, around murk and mud.
Ropes between names that remain much the same.
On the old maps the boldest lines are given to hills and rivers,
The certain land, the shaped sky, the body’s eye for how far to go.
Bold are the mountains names,
and all the rivers and streams called out strong.
The railways proudly curved,
each cutting marked, each bridge, each station.
The nested churches, so many of them,
on river washed promentaries, round walled yards,
God’s garden planted with the patient dead.
All the departed flock silent to wake and watch
The gaudy tombs of the living, their leaden lovely flesh,
Their thirsts unquenched, drowned even, downcast even,
Lost in a mistaken world, old maps redrawn,
The roads lost, the roaring wind, the bleak days.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, biosphere, deep ecology, fog, Land of the dead, landscape, landscape photography, light, mountains, numinous, perception, Poetry, self-, Wales on August 25, 2015| 5 Comments »
This land,
The land of the dead,
A second skin, translucent,
Golden.
At the centre of each apple,
The sign of love:
The fivefold mutable, son and mother.
Over mountains a cream and violet fog,
Rolled, undulous, attentively folds.
A mysterious union,
Somewhat secret and holy.
The sky, a long vowel, holding its light.
A fluent time,
A tickled, breezeless sigh.
Not so still as to be nothing.
For the tiny roar
Of valley trees, a whispered thing
Measuring miles.
Vaporous drop,
Drip, congealed,
A reflected skin of nothing,
A silver round fruit,
Womb, belly, dream.
This skin
Is our beautiful horizon,
An inner organ.
Our own birdsong:
A poetic heart.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dawn, landscape, landscape photography, mist, Poetry, summer, sun, Wales on August 12, 2015| Leave a Comment »
veiled
though we sleep
dream or wake.
the world wrapped
in its own light
soaked in whispered
breath.
a fountain of waters
a tree, a river,
wondrous emergent
a circular thing
a pearl gently
warmed in fire,
dawn misted,
floating.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Ancient Chinese poetry, duty, exile., historical parallels, isolation, landscape, landscape photography, Poetry, slow collapse, the borderlands, the edge, the wilds, watch, weather on August 10, 2015| Leave a Comment »
A CERTAIN BLEAK BEAUTY
1
Endless rains
I wake early before dawn.
The dreams I recall
Are of loss and confusion.
2
The bonfires burn blue and bitter.
The mantra of compassion rings hollow
When all harvests have failed.
3
News from home is slow to arrive:
The roads often impassable,
Slow and winding
Through the hills.
4
My bones are weary.
I turn restless, from side to side.
The flies circling the room
Slower and slower each day
Fail to find the open window.
5
Though we are far
from the borderlands
Everyone fears invasion.
6
A song from the past
I cannot quite remember,
Of the moon and a girl
And a river.
7
Wind from the mountains
Tastes of snow.
The grasses are lank
and yellowing.
8
There is a certain bleak beauty
In the dark night,
Filled only
with the echoing cries of foxes.
9
News from the capital
Is dreary and unconvincing:
Familiar, lazy formulas.
The treasuries are empty,
The halls smell stale of old food.
10
Only this small thin cat is content
Paws flicking in sleep,
Curled up warm.
A collection of fleeting images, reflecting the present, but echoing the laments of those border guards of Ancient China
.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged awareness, landscape, landscape photography, memory, nature, Poetry, poetry traditions, remembereing. recording, Scotland, Sorley MacLean, the past, Wales, wilderness on July 28, 2015| 2 Comments »
Sure of this Sorley has spoken
His sweet scouring gravel words
Pure paced, precise grey grinding stones
Pouring splendid golden grain,
Eloquence of earth.
Though few have heard
Or paid him heed.
Old, tweeded, sharp-eyed scholar
Wandered, windblown on
Steep lined western shores
Between deserted croft
And sand-scoured macha.
His mountains named
One by one,
His steadings remarked,
His memories buried safe,
All buried under stone,
The language of remaining
Despite scorn and spittle.
A path half-made
Through hillside rocks,
The prints of deer,
Silence is the heather.
These winds whistle
Through an empty heart.
These words, a whisky
For the tongue that is parched,
A decent medicine
Against the clean sin
Of city streets,
Their promise to forget
Cold and weather,
An unceased consumption
Of time and art and loveliness.
Without the cry of curlew
Without the wheeling hoodie
Without the slap of salt wind
We think ourselves gods
Who are short, soft animals
One moment from bleached oblivion.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged a blur of betony, afternoon, Beulah, early morning, Irfon Valley, landscape, pastoral, photography, Poetry, Powys, summer, Wales on July 24, 2015| Leave a Comment »
TWO BY BEULAH
1
A break in the cloud:
A mouth of light
Drifts slowly over Beulah.
Dawn cannot be long.
Bats flicker vision,
A fluttering heartbeat.
Warm air, rain-wet
And rose-heavy.
2
The road sways soft
Down to Beulah.
Drowsy with valerian,
Hammocked easy
On sweet drift meadowsweet.
Awake the spired, serry willowherb,
And betony: scatter of exclamation.
We float light upon
Our own bright shadows.
The afternoon sun
And cloud valleys singing.
The road down to Beulah
Under the mountain.
—
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.
simonhlilly 