Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cries, landscape, longing, lost mariners, Poetry, seagulls, the land, the sea, the shore, whiteness on August 29, 2014| Leave a Comment »
LONGING
Whiteness are the cries:
The gull’s long falling.
Souls, dead sailors,
Yearning for the taste
And smell of their women.
Hungry for the certainty of land,
A green that does not oppress the chest,
(The cold density of blackness).
Weightless, they long for weight,
For edge, an up and a down,
The rolling hills,
The cold, bright iron of sunlight,
The balm of church bells,
A pattern to days,
A scent of mown grass
After rain.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged landscape, photography, Poetry, Powys, Saint Llywel, time, tree spirits, trees, Wales, yews on August 27, 2014| 11 Comments »
YEWS OF LLYWEL
1
Older than theologies,
Blood grail holder
A taste of cinnamon and rust.
He would have stood here shaded,
Llywel, eyes following your dark spirals,
Hands and back against your rough dragon skin,
Watching the rain sweep in across the valley trees.
The little stream growing loud then quiet again,
The nod of measowsweet and hawkweed,
A thick, potent prayer tasting on his lips.
2
Lidless, you seeing yews,
Eyes fast on eternity,
Shrugging off days and years.
Time, (even), kneels down in your shade
Forgetting all but this one moment,
Head bowed, long-veined hands
Like the valleys of the Epynt,
River full and throbbing green,
Bending seawards, bending to the lowlands,
Bending to the silence, to the confluence of breath,
An instant of clarity, wordless, bubbled, weightless.
The chambered heart, rope and sinew,
Knotted, released, a stretched tympanum quivering.
One vowel, one consonant, one tree.
3
My tongue a rolling mist,
A down feather aimless,
Unable to approach nearer
The in and out of your mighty, inexorable breath.
Time’s golden apples fall ripe and fall rotten,
Lapsed thought imcomprehensible.
A simple vastness, single, resounding,
A parliament of photons.
Woven thickly, red, hard, etched water.
A held swirl, thirled moments,
Nailed, transfigured, an apotheosis
Beyond good or bad, beyond purpose,
Beyond meaning,
An etymology of divinity.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged altitude, belonging, hills, landscape, new home, photography, Poetry, Powys, rivers, uplands, Wales, weather on August 21, 2014| 6 Comments »
We are living now in a taller silence.
Settled down to a rhythm of hymnals,
Level with the swallow’s breast.
On the edge of long valleys winding northwards
Where the skies divide and clouds battalion,
(The sheep-cleared highlands where ghosted soldiers thunder).
Grey walled are the lichened churches, hunched and hummocked,
Grey walled the farms, grey walled the cwms,
Silver and green the streams under grey spanned arches.
Time turning back to itself, not a straight but a winding road.
Time, as patient as a ripening sloe, taking hues from each twilight.
Time measured in the names of saints, in their prayers and footsteps.
We are living now in subtler skies, rhymed, alliterate, nuanced.
Between threaded rivers: alder-toed Dulas among the sedge grass;
Oak-vaulted Irfon where Llewellyn stumbled never to rise again;
The Bran, the Gwyddon, the Cledan, the Cammarch,
All matched by the paths of stars in the tall, silent night.
The rain sweeps colour from the distance now,
The sun blesses this and then that field with light.
Hills melt and reappear, the ashes sway in a westerly wind.
We settle deeper yet and become still, edged with moments,
Wrapped and whispered, between the syncopated grazings of sheep.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Haiku-ish, landscape, nature, photography, Poetry, roads, summer, travel on August 20, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Fragments from a Long Road
In the blue shadows:
White bindweed moons.
Indescribable fragrance,
This August, summer air.
How the hills
Swell with rain,
Rise pale and loiter
At the edge of sight.
Chicory, wide-eyed
by the roadside,
Ragged blue
as the windy sky.
Even through these warm still days,
The scot’s pines, ever singing
Of storms and roaring seas.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, hills, landscape, new home, old graveyard, photography, Poetry, Powys, settling, Wales on August 15, 2014| 1 Comment »
ROOSTED
Between the light stream and the dark stream,
Upon the ridge road blessed in sun, washed by rain,
We have settled now near the gentle dead,
(Slate heads ivy-wrapped, whispering praises
In the old, long language, name and age and date).
Crumbled, crumbling, the dried yarrow, ground ivy,
Under the green candled boughs of the arbor vita,
Under the arc of apple and yew and hazel.
Wings folded, feathers shaken, we roost.
Reacquianted with the arc of silence,
With the certain thickness of stone walls,
With the roaring call down tall chimneys,
The voices choired, remembered, grass green.
Under the oakwoods and under the ash,
Along honeysuckle and rose-cooled evenings,
Into moon-swept, singing midnight.
Swept up, returned by chance.
Become hills, become vales,
Become the smooth, rolling road.
—-
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged awareness, Classical Chinese poetry, fugue, improvisations on a theme, landscape, Li Po, nature of mind, Poetry, space, transformation, translation, transliteration, void on August 10, 2014| 4 Comments »
Before and After Li Po
( improvisations on the poem “Jingting Shan Hill” by Li Po, following the lead of Robert Okaji)
Characters are rendered:
Crowd birds high fly utmost
Lonely cloud alone go idle
Mutual watch both not tire
Only be Jingting Shan
1
Birds, a scattered knot
In distant depth.
One cloud aimless
(This thought).
Lost the mirror distance,
Resonant, the still hill.
2
Silent swing the flock.
Wind flute, too, silent
At this peak of distance.
We exist only because
Of the other.
Green hill breathing.
3
Caught, the distant, sweet movement.
An upper air, a life of song and wind,
Silent here from this depth.
See too, there is one small cloud,
Sweet movement hesitant.
So, now, eye sinks earthwards,
Locks on swelling hill,
There before, and there after,
A poet’s gaze.
4
Scribble splatter
Brush of birds.
Splashed distant sky.
One thought lost,
The hand and eye
Follow each other,
Equally curious.
A mountain of bone
And earth,
Misted,
Remains.
5
The names matter.
On the tongue, in memory.
Located the sweep of sky,
The noisy flock of one mind,
The moment,
A congregation
Of blessings.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged calm, landscape, Poetry, summer, time on July 22, 2014| 10 Comments »
LONG SUMMER
Hay lies golden.
A still, blue morning threaded
With skimming swallows.
Waiting, (for nothing in particular),
Thoughts form a translucent tent,
The hollow hush of calm.
A butterfly’s uncertain path,
breeze-borne, is this life,
Certain as the edge of summer clouds.
Time, a slow roll across hillsides,
Sun and moon, sun and moon,
A garland of slow, warm days.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, cloud, early morning, full moon, Guru Purnima, July, landscape, light, moon, Poetry, wind on July 13, 2014| 2 Comments »
Too many references to ‘super moon’, only one I saw to Guru Purnima, which is this full moon in July dedicated to all our teachers.
FAST SMOKE (Guru Purnima)
Through a fast smoke of cloud
This golden moon, full as it can be,
Wrapped with light and golden,
Arcs out of sight,
Golden in a golden morning.
From its vastness it has seen the sun,
Seen the day, breathed in light,
Exhaled in fullness.
Absorbed, we are absolved of necessity,
Filled up with ample goodness.
No need to know. Nothing obscured.
Nothing beyond reach.
Enfolded radiant, as this moon.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, ascent through the spheres, celestial spheres, distance, heavens, invisible gods, Jupiter, landscape, medieval cosmology, planets, Poetry, transcendence on July 12, 2014| 2 Comments »
Spera iovis, Jupiter
An ineffable thunder.
A benevolent sky untouchable,
Bewashed with holy white.
His eye, from that smoky height,
Benevolent, or careless.
Sucking up breath, bellows,
A bull in heat, a vast progenitor
Bestowing fast waters, furious light.
A plunger, a pummeller, a fondler
Of breasted mountains, a piercer
Of earth’s deep, warm valleys.
The biology of deity: what is fecund
Evolves to the remote ineffable.
The lusty roarer, to righteous, wrathful judgment.
Template to transcendence, he dabbles yet
And dribbles his pleasures in little lives
Spread-legged, surprised by glory.
Panting and flattered by the fierce blast
Of his rumbled, lascivious breath,
His weight borne down and admitted.
So it is a face of infinity,
A voice vague with distance,
A beam breaking clouds,
A covenant, a breaking into and out of,
Grandiose lusts and transfiguring flesh,
A feast of flesh for formless air, a cold, clear possession.
No other face but a storm of thunder and a sudden cloud,
An animal roar, a shower of gold.
All encompassing as air, as mountain squall, a rush of cold water,
As clay turned incense, as sacrificial fire on beacon top.
The placation and violence of an unseen height. From there is sought
Return of revolutions, approving victories, an evolution
Of sorts and measures.
An eagle’s wing, a single feather, a sharp beak, a clutching claw.
A rosary of names heroic, a prayer of appeasement and summoning.
Above all, and through it all,
A mystery of heaving curtains,
A spotlit stage with screaming plot,
A certain, definitive gravity, the thunderer.
A strange evolution it is from dark cloud and downpour
To remote, inviolable vastness.
But they all do shuffle and elbow eternally,
These interferers, these hungry, unconcerned
Bickering departmental managers,
Jealous and lusty,
Breeding prophets and demigods in casual catastrophe.
They run off with themselves, whooping and roaring,
Eternal adolescents, hormonally sparkling, unrestrained
In all their sudden, bright passions.
Free from opprobrium, earthy,celestial gardens of delight.
simonhlilly 
Conversations with Invisible Friends(15)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ambience, art, bits and pieces, comments, consciousness, Haiku, Haiku-ish, inspiration, interiors, landscape, photography, Poetry, short pieces, summer, writing on August 17, 2014| Leave a Comment »
CONVERSATIONS 15
REWRITE
Convincing ghosts rewrite our certain pasts,
or bitter to the last, at least try to inject their dying voices,
inject their reasons, their stories.
We all, full of hunger, scurry for validation,
deny our small wickednesses, rewrite, remember.
—
SHADED
In that
Green shade
We are made
And unmade.
Click of insect moments.
—
COUPLET
The demons of eloquence
are not always right,
but their arguments
should always ruffle and delight!
—
HARMONIC
What each we are,
A note plucked once and dying.
Attack, sustain, release, delay.
That harmonic wave is what we are,
How we intrude,
How we linger.
—
SMALL
Over that hill it is always dawn, always midnight.
The smell of dew on hay,
The rising insects floating silent.
All this is uniquely ours –
This dawn, this sunset,
A moment fashioned and nested.
An egg of memory, in this small circle.
—
SUNLIT
The pillars of the sky:
Skylark’s song.
Morning stillness.
—
NOT QUITE
In you…
Nothing moves
That is not world’s spin,
Past’s voice.
A wind’s will,
A wisp,
Not quite a nothing
Not quite a quite…
—
EDGE
One star remaining
White edge of the summer night
Rimmed, restless, drawn out.
—
BINARY
Alert
Or asleep, on
or off,
The eye
Of the I,
Blink, unblink,
Blink.
—-
VALEDICTION
The vale of now.
We move in and out of it
Hardly touching,
So caught up we are:
The sounds of our own echoing,
Fading footprints.
Mouthing alphabets
And times-tables.
Numerate, literate,
Dust dressed in story,
Veiled whisp, regardless.
—
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