Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ambience, hills, landscape, moon, morning, Poetry, summer, Wales on July 10, 2015| Leave a Comment »
A lovely mist
Swaddles and swathes,
Dissolving the ground.
The chant of it –
An ululation of hilltops,
A thin taste of cloud.
The silent morning,
A slow rolling light,
A gentlest breeze,
A river ripple.
A high
And abandoned moon
Sings up the sun.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged awareness, dawn, destiny, history, landscape, memory, Poetry, the numinous on June 24, 2015| 4 Comments »
Hours slow and stutter,
Stretch and scatter on the summer hills.
This lent breath pauses.
A sun enthroned throws flame
Against a wide horizon
But melts to mist, cools to blue distant hum.
A flicker swallow dives low.
We barely skim the surface –
A month or two before forgetting
What we came for.
In glistering dark
We become our own ghosts.
In sharp-edged day
Weighed down we are
With longer shadows.
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 beginning of summer, consciousness, daybreak, dream, ephemeral phenomena, hawthorn, landscape, mist, nature, perception, Poetry, reality, seasons, time, viewpoint on June 4, 2015| 2 Comments »
A pearl day, smoke shaped.
A lick of mist this river’s voice.
Hills turn cloud, clouds become all.
A single dreaming moment
Explains everything.
More precious than breath
It lifts weightless, turns and dissolves,
Sky colours leaning out.
What was golden dulls to dust.
An aching tumble of sweet May,
A thorned white wave enthroned.
A season’s birth heavy laid,
A full descent, a grace,
An offered all, begun.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, biophilia, continuance, dawn, grace, hunger for more, Irfon Valley, landscape, landscape photography.pastoral, need, Poetry, survival, temperance, Wales, world on June 1, 2015| 4 Comments »
One more time
Words congeal,
Nest in dawn light.
Enough is the
Expanding breath,
Round, sent out blue,
Seeking peace.
Enough the slow fall,
Enough the dream.
One more time
Gathered, harboured.
Precise is the prayer:
Extinguish the
Hungry fire.
Only this:
That ceaseless hunger:
Cascading decay,
Mistaken for upwards.
A race diminished
Striving for worth,
Consumed and driven.
No art but blunder.
Graceless the fall.
In the pale of its cool,
In the wash of the mist,
In slowing breath and moment
Can we learn to rest easy?
Wanting nothing but enough,
As if we were the last
To ever be here.
Seeded in peace,
Dwelt and released.
A song sighed,
Never forgot.
A world haunted
With beauty
All remaining.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged hawthorn, landscape, May, Poetry, summer on May 23, 2015| 13 Comments »
WE RISE
We rise late
And tumble down
Towards it all:
A day suggested, infused,
Green and sunlit
Cloud and birdsong.
This late white
Bitter honey of May,
A mother’s scent,
A sparkled dew.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ambience, art, landscape, photography, Poetry, rain, spring, Wales, weather on May 20, 2015| Leave a Comment »
A feathered crouch
Cool and slewed wind
Mountains hunch
Shuffle in and out
Tides of rain
A slow long tune.
A green nation
Rules the cuckoo’s voice
Stretched long the river rings
Vivid is the wood
Tousled the tall larch
Fathoms deep the bluebell haze
Grey and dappled
All sorrow weighed with joy
In tonsured cities
Days careful are numbered
Then forgot.
—
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, art, awareness, folk lore, influence, landscape, Llanwrtyd, memory, Poetry, Pwyll Bo, saint, sentience, song lines, spirit, time, Wales, water on April 29, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Pwll y Bo, “Pool of the wraith”, is a wooded, rocky cascade of the River Irfon on the road up the Abergwesyn valley, a few miles from where I live. Downstream, stranded now in silence, but once the heart of Llanwrtyd, the old church site of St. David’s on a small spur of hillside around which the ascending road curls. Saint and spirit, a confluence of notions.
PWLL Y BO (1)
Mountain air threads mist in valley sleep.
We dreamless lie, cherishing weight.
Up at Pwyll Bo, I suppose, the lean, green larches
Will stand roaring down the dawn winds.
The oaks, staid grey and still on their slanted hill.
The otter shall sink and roll, melting to water.
Mossed rock wet, endless white the tumble.
Ever hollow spans the spirit’s song, a haunted bridge.
The winding path to delight is to be walked not run.
Time given to sliding slow eyes, side on side,
To stop and to forget.
This breath the church of all gods,
The heart’s Holy Ghost light woven.
Time enough for long blue days
And the dead slowly revolving
On the hillside church
Wriggling back to earth and seed.
Their heads now risen green, unfurled,
A dappled Trump each last and every day.
Unknown things travelling down
Are woven, whirled and worded.
Skein thin spirit clothed and given sight.
A voice, even, from rock and worried water.
Grasped and clothed its essence sings,
The illusory cling of names forgot,
The savoured winding sheet of waves
And pillowed, folded rocks.
It says, it says:
The confluence of all rivers is the ocean.
The confluence of all words is the heart.
Shall it cleave to the warmth of sunlight,
Wood avens and violets on the bank?
Or shall it bend into moonlight,
Emptying all in cool rest, the starlit air?
Or long longing, wait for drifting careless breath
Warm bodies dabbled, absent stares,
To speak heard and unheard,
Noticed yet unrecognised?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged attention, change, consciousness, earthquake, ephemera, landscape, nature, Nepal, night, Poetry, time on April 28, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Clouds flower in moonlight.
A wind rises, full of owls.
Cold that will wither the buds,
The sun will make right.
Far away, mountains have fallen.
What was, has crumbled.
We dream and dream and fall through time.
Each view infused, each moment passing.
simonhlilly 