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Posts Tagged ‘landscape’

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STONE LORDS

Our tall hats, sky scraping, cloud stirring,
Raking, forming, our tall hats.

Our black hats, cliff-crag dark,
Storm dark, night full.
Our black hats.

Given by the lords of years,
These moving towers, rocking.
These watchtowers,
These habitations of watchers.
Given us.

Watchers, sky-full of silence.
Hawk-bright shaded eyes,
Biding behind dark brows,
We bide,
Dark browed.

We need not hands to raise against.
Need not fingers to point.
Nor voice to accuse,
Nor clever, subtle speech,
No invective.

Poise, presence,
Inscrutibility fledged beneath
The stern circle of dark rim.
Tall hats, dark hats, bestowing gravity,
Beacons of authority.

Rock dreaming,
Injected, a bolus of catastrophe.
We, the chorus,
Mocking your wriggled evacuations.
We shall never, as you will, now
Pass distraught, hand-wringing,
Rote excuse for skin.

We shall never squirm nor flutter,
Racing thither on dismal errand,
Bending brightness to aggrandise vapour,
Bending sense, roping goodness,
Making slave-chains to chafe the free.
Oh, we see clear.
We see your oily wishes,
Your sly agreements.
How you stain the day.
How you stain.

Our tall hats
Shall follow your ways.
Watch us on the heights.
Watch us circle dark valleys.
Unencumbered vigilence,
Patient for judgement,
Implacable,
Undeceived.

May your tiny,
Malevolent souls,
Naked and revealed,
Shrivel.
May your rights
Recycle to the innocent.
May the wheeling carrion birds
Revolve and clamour
Til you no more sully
This earth, this sky.
May you relinquish your folly
Before it plagues and howls,
Extirpating your breathing memory.

—-

Born from a recounted dream of handless beings guarding the clifftops from the perennial parastic politicians who wore tall black top hats. Reminded me of the crags of the Preseli hills, the watchers of Easter Island, the tall astronomically accurate solid gold hats of the Neolithic,
Of the cairns and tombstones of the quiet places, of the attentive wariness of those without voice…….

the image is from an Iron Age Celtic coin that seems to show a storm or mountain deity

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Drift

DRIFT

A half moon wanes,
Floating on birdsong.

The world spins towards darkness,
And spins towards light.

Clouds stretched, skeined,
Soft-edged, rippling.

A drift, a slow drift
Into day.

This quiet time,
Twilit, a gift given
Before the goad of doing.

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STORM DAYS

This hollow, unrevealed sky.
Dipping, a magpie attempts a new meridian,
A straight flight to food or shelter.

The dead elms’ reaching fingers quiver;
Power chords, the cables roar.

We each and all must huddle and endure,
With the sparrows, with the ever joyous,
Garrulous sparrows – delicate and subtle
In their design, a clutch of heartbeats,
Warm, communal.

No malevolence in the weather.
No malfeasance in the storm.
Another day to sing about.

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Four pieces from early this morning, ancestral mutters: sky crowns and words from the Anglo-Saxon.

SIGNIFICATOR

The whispers of the stars of dawn,
Rooted in deep paths, seated mind.
Mind that seeks names only,
Seeks genealogies, plumbs down fathoms,
The pitch of rightness.
To themselves they whisper,
Remembering the weave and twist of gold,
The movers in the shadows,
The movers of twilight,
The flickering torchlight,
The muffled, shuffled feet of steady procession,
Of circular dance taking up positions,
Constellations of mirrored geometries
Winding up time before babes yawn,
Before the aches of morning stretch and sigh.
Before the biting cold, the stirring of embered dawn.
Before has passed.
Before has misted away.
The whispered eloquence of now,
A tranquil moment turned and knotted,
A place remembered on a silent road:
Signpost, crossed paths, significator.

—-

FIRE PRAYER

I kneel, cold water,
Before the fire to kindle,
A prayer for light and warmth:
Cold water, flying cloud.
For spark and roaring:
Cold wave, cold tide.
For return of belonging,
For reason to remain.

—-

WANDERER

The lament of the dispossessed –
The long diminishing curlew.
The urgent, soft cries of lovers –
Wild geese, wild geese.
The road is a way but not a home.
The footsteps of others, small consolation
When they have vanished to the horizon,
Gone on before, singing the old song.
Cloud-cloaked wanderer tasting salt.
His children, weighed metre,
The lilt of left and right.

ACHE

Raked by claws
(This wolf cold).
Blood stain tumbling
Clear watered pools:
These clouds of squall
In dawn skies.
World’s ribs sigh
And shiver –
The ache
Of onwards.

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VALLEY SPIRIT

Over the last hill
Our prize is the view

Where the village nests,
Wood wreathed, woodsmoke.

Gathered fields almost,
Almost ready for spring

But patient, cautious,
Unhurried.

As unhurried as the morning.
Its grey lambswool clouds,
A blanket for Imbolc.

CROSS-HATCH

Imbolc morning:
Clouds like wolves,
And sheep.
Sun on all.

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DAWN CHORUS AND MOMENTS OF FROST

As if this feather, slow-turning, falls,
One breath of ice, branching blades
Arcing ghosts of fern, arced ghost of forests.
Pinioned cold, eager, aware, edge fractured.
Fingertips feeling for pattern, the familiar
Stretched pale, translucent.

As the scattered, sprinkled pierce of sound,
Woven between moonlit pale dawn wind,
Tumbling, cascades and choirs,
A flurry of beak and breast-soft down.

As all life joined up by song,
No less, no more meaning than this.
Small hearts full and pouring,
The vessel, vehicle, of the world.

No more and no less than this:
The opening of small mouths,
The fast tremble of accepting hearts.
Light now, and slow revolutions through space.

This place, placement, placid, pellucid.
Transcendent fingers frosting fine feathers,
Growing, though not grasping,
Water flowers framed in ice.

Small time, halted, crystalline.
Slow arcs of how things are,
How they happen.
Seen, unseen, diverted, amalgamated.
Dawn chorus and the moments of frost.
Suspended breath, then
Light and song.
No more, nor no less
Than this.

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TALLIS EXULTANT

Golden moon rests
Upon a throne of low cloud.

All night long-
As bright as day.

Dawn shall not diminish her:
Sinking radiant
Into new lands.

A long music,
A choir of days.
Tallis exultant.

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DUET
(two ghosts in blue mirror).

a spontaneity of words by Simon Lilly and Jessica Ryan. This began when I commented on a picture Jessica published alongside her blog just before Christmas. http://soveryvery.wordpress.com.
It turned out quite nicely, I think, so here it is:

That image is what?
Ordinary, unspectacular, mute,
but made something perfect
by colour,detail and the art of looking.
Ambience Radiating Truth,
a little art.

The light, the air,
the moment.
A conspiracy for
rather than against me.
Maybe art is just that –
a conspiracy for.

A pattern infiltrated
and worn upon oneself,
a brief belonging.

All too brief.
And we gasp.
And we grasp after
the flickering perfection
of the pattern, seen.

Seen is eaten by heart,
head not withstood
(though best ignored
or humoured with thin smiles).
Seen is been seen,
marked by all, included, amongst.
We are twill, tweed, embroidered,
embroiled regardless of high or low regard.
Our guard is dropped,
melting into the passionless is.

Seen and consumed,
heart’s regard (less more high low)
is consummated.
Our guard,
an empty collection of warp and weft,
never understood the story of orange and blue.

A tunnelling path
carved through flickering time,
framed roads, named, unnamed,
tasted with hesitant tongue, delighted ear.
Pulsed, a walking rhythm,
a posy of moments, empty and full.
Shall we walk together down the long evenings,
birdsong and laughter,
or fear the empty bridge,
the shallowed gold pit?

A pocket full.
Ignore the hard edges
pretending the end.
The pellucid vibrancy spills out,
centers the path tickling the birdsong’s laugh
off of our tongues.
And so we shall.
What else to do with bursting moments
but walk the gloaming?

The gloomy gloaming
of the joker tomb.
Mock serious and smirking.
It cannot hold a moment longer,
bursting with radiate light.
We can afford generosity,
shedding skins, attaining orbits.
Starlit, wandering,
trying out new names with new lips,
forgetting, laughing at footprints:
leaf litter on an autumn path.

Lost once, lost twice,
a cliff of thought,
a tunnelled, mysterious evening.
Mapled flutter,
mapled collapse, mapled incense.
Hesitant even,
hastened steps, a whispered wind,
a small bowl of sorrow,
a small bowl of delight.

I’ve dreamed of a third bowl,
wobbling on its edge.

Its sound is round,
debating gravity and stillness.
A heart or notion, a simple holding,
a significator, the dreamer mirrored dream,
a season, a map, a world of half light and half dark,
rotating,
a long whispered vowel.

A calling between consonants.
Aggravating the spin,
hand to hand among the maple trim.
The cartography of my heart,
studied in your grin,
the sugar portending a notion of splendor
made dormant.
The punctuation pauses,
cupped, before the sound begins.

A sweet sound.
A sweet silence.
That path between, slyly negotiated:
a low sigh.

The rustle of the blood’s report.
The mirrored blush shies cheek
and dropping leaf.
Is this the place
where it all starts?

polarity door2

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NEW. YEAR’S DAY

A long blessing
Shunned and huddled against.
Rain in lines and columns –
Tall ghosts tramping flat the fields.
The valley crouches sodden,
Hill and distance dissolved to grey.
Things move as little as possible,
Only the sound of running water
Returning to restless distant seas.

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UNDERPASS

Discarded words,
Crisp once now sodden spinelesss,
Losing colour
Swept down underpasses,
Damp and ammoniac,
An autumn of emotion,
Sullen sludge becoming inchoate wail.
Ripped from mind of one,
Falling into cascade of cliché,
The parcelled soap of millions,
Petty drama deified,
Rigorously abandoned
For the next scene.
Ghosts and leaves,
Both noun and verb
Are we become.
We have fallen into the sere….
Our own phantom menace,
The deeds we did and did not
Haunting the municipal paths,
Ifs and buts in overfilled bins
For late wasps of conscience
To drain some goodness out
And last the long winter
Sheltered in some crook of warmth.
Fire and fallen leaf
Flicker, send up incense,
A bonfire to remembrances
Found and lost,
Found and lost.

—–
A haunting image, subtle, empty, that graced the graceful words of Jessica Ryan’s blog post soveryvery.wordpress.com ‘One’s place’ is the spark for this flurry.

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