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Posts Tagged ‘landscape’

The Yews of Abergwesyn

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 30, 2014| 4 Comments »

LLANHIFANGEL ABERGWESYN

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Heather, royally purple, clothing the hillsides above.
Around the circles of Llanhifangel Abergwesyn,
The silver, sanding shores of Irfon, curved and rippled.

Sheltered from sheep, this round silent shield
Is where they are gathered, where they are splintered,
Where they are woven.

United, divided, leaning into the storms of Time.
Hausers swinging between centuries
Binding sun and earth, to heaven, even.

Knitted light revolved and spun,
Wheels in wheels, a thousand eyes
Open and closing, a blink of orbital rhythm.

These trees, these towers, these castles roaring upwards.
Ladders of chant and silence,
Spilt shade.

Bow ye down,
Bow ye graceful between the gravestones,
Flaked and moss green.

Bone and mind incorporate,
Reawoke, voiceless and benign
In speckled sunlight, sublime.

—

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Longing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , 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.

—

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Yews of Llywel

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 27, 2014| 11 Comments »

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A Taller Silence

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , 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.

—

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Fragments from a long road

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on August 20, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Fragments from a Long Road

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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.

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Conversations with Invisible Friends(15)

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 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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Roosted

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 15, 2014| 1 Comment »

ROOSTED

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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.

—-

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Before and After Li Po

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , 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.

—

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Long Summer

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , 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.

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Fast Smoke (Guru Purnima)

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , 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.

—

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