Posted in Uncategorized, tagged consciousness, language, metaphysics, mind, Poetry, time on July 25, 2022| 3 Comments »
ELECTRIC SILENCE
Memory is an electric silence.
Snowstorm at midnight
The tyre tracks we follow disappearing fast.
All the words, all the words,
Settle thickly obscuring what lies beneath.
If you do not know that moonlit void,
Without a body, without a thought,
Freedom shall elude you.
Racing on,
The road vanishing
Under the weight of white noise.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged consciousness, landscape, language, nature, perspective, Poetry, rivers, Wales on April 26, 2022| Leave a Comment »
RIVER WORDS
They do not say
What they sing
For your listening
But for their own joy.
No will of their own
But to find the deepest
And return.
Where streams meet:
A birth of spirals.
By the bridge
The patterns hold steady.
Acquiescence to the way.
We think we know them
By their names we know them.
We know them by their names.
You name the river
‘Destroyer of the children of men’.
I name this river
‘Gentle mother of fields’
The river calls itself:
‘Longing for stillness
In the deep’.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, consciousness, language, myth, Poetry, psyche, story, time, words on February 4, 2021| 2 Comments »
THESE MAPS, THESE ROADS
These maps, these roads, written and rewritten word on word.
Size and distance, though, these are not to be measured.
The roads and maps are real but travelled, somehow,
By ships that fly, by pigs that speak, by horses
That move and yet not move.
The shape of words – that is the key
To all that is and is not.
The holy lines that sum up all dimensions,
That lie so perfectly,
That birth sound out of silence and void.
Chase the edge of one thing, the infinite borders,
The central compass points.
Trace with keen fingertips the way they merge and separate.
The same pattern is in the whorls of your hand and always has been.
The world is measured by its forgetfulness.
The eternal is uncovered by those with perfected memory.
No words left orphaned, no thought muddied or misplaced.
A perfect fractal prison of a million voices,
Laying down the roads and all the maps.
Remembering, remembering, it is all remembering.
Beyond the gods and monsters
There is a perturbation of light and shadow.
Beyond light and shadow, a flickering notion of this and that.
Beyond this and that, a line of movement and a point of stillness.
A certain chain of gravity, (that is love and jealousy),
And a flow of iron-grey chains.
The roads, the winds of space, move along,
The paths of gods and worlds dreaming,
Dreaming they have time and space and something,
Something else, a name, a reason, a future, a history.
A certain trajectory, a ricochet away into story.
New words, same roads, same houses, new owners,
Same walls, same ghosts, same roads, new roads,
New names.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, consciousness, continuance, language, photography, Poetry, the past on January 8, 2021| Leave a Comment »
THESE WORDS
.
These words we feed around our firesides,
They are the seeds that feed us.
These words, the sustaining grain.
By them we will be filled,
By them, we reach out and touch others.
By them, we find songs and sing.
By them, we see visions.
By them, we feel edges and give names.
By them, the sudden scent of memories floods in,
The healing waters, the healing well.
.
In these words are the songs of our forebears, their dances.
The words we use, they flavour our world.
They are our beer, our bread, our whisky, our offerings.
.
These words mean more than they say,
Each filled with spirits, each a ghost coming home.
.
We plant them here to grow, to become forest roots,
To become the patterns between stars.
They are the rivers in the oceans,
They are the paths our ancestors have always taken,
Moving on from land to shining land,
Hearth to hearth across the dancing skies.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, archetypal patterns, consciousness, Freedom, language, Mabinogion, metaphysics, neurology, Poetry, the unconscious, tradition, Wales on September 29, 2020| Leave a Comment »
ARCHETYPAL
The hunter father transgresses;
The mother suffers unjustly;
The child is taken.
What was wonderful, vanishes.
The light disappears, no one knows where.
Roads, veils and mirrors –
The mechanics of universal dance,
The momentous, minuscule choice.
The bright, eternal child brought low,
Brought back to the wrist of the falconer,
Brought back to rule in glory,
Brought back to catch the uncatchable.
And all the time
It is she that saves the day,
Who bestows and restores balance,
Who names, who summons, who moves
Like a moon through darkness
Sorrowful and joyful and blissfully full.
And the child, neither here nor there,
Neither this nor that,
Tricked by innocence
To reveal the weakness,
To discover an impossible death,
To wait endlessly in the wings
For the lines of the last act,
The resolution.
I ask to know the truth
So that there may be understanding of power.
That the maps are unfolded
And the well-trod, invisible roads revealed.
Because we are free only to follow the well-worn ways,
Because there is only one plot and one story
From the beginning.
Because, tried and tested are the grey chains.
Because, tried and tested is the only freedom.
The rules of falling, and of redemption.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged analogy, consciousness, First Branch, landscape, landscape photography, language, Mabinogion, Poetry, Pwyll, reality, self-, Wales on September 14, 2020| Leave a Comment »
FIRST LESSON
You will have been wandering, I suppose,
Through the sunny, vague landscapes of your life
Following the habitual hounds of thought
Weaving in and out your thoughts.
.
You will have come across these words,
Sucking them up, making them yours
Before even thinking, before even thinking,
To whom do they belong? Whose voice, now?
.
We believe ourselves sovereign here:
My mind, my territory, my dwelling place.
But is that really so? (is what I ask.)
You have wandered into other worlds
Oblivious of boundaries, so hungry for more,
So sure of what is.
In an instant, becoming something else
( a folded, entangled irony, to enjoy all the horror movie themes).
.
A skin not yours adheres,
So you become something you were not.
What we do, we become.
What we take in, becoming our responsibility.
.
Shimmering are the edges of the world.
Mirrors and doorways are everywhere.
Names are roles and speech
Sets about great tidal shifts.
.
You know what you know now
By becoming what you were not.
A communion of voices.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flow, inspiration, language, Poetry, the moment it is there it is gone, word river, writing on August 9, 2020| Leave a Comment »
WRITE
Write with the surge
Of words that boils up,
Nor tide over the roar
And rushing hiss, the fast bliss
Of licking, foaming sound
Eating sand and landwards,
Landwards up to cloud
Up to grass and sun.
Past the decent reach,
Roaring past the pitch
And yaw, troubling the roads
Eating the lazy lean of worn pathways,
Spitting out new views raw and hot with life,
life that burns bright and dances wild.
Life that lifts its skirts
And does not care.
A fire and flood of windswept words
That will whisper and remain:
“That we were here, that we were here”
Long into the longer silent night.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, awen, bardic effusion, definition, fluidity, landscape photography, language, lesson, meanings, metaphysics, Poetry, the sacred, un-naming, water on May 14, 2020| 2 Comments »
The Stones Of Words In The Rivers Of Meaning
‘Sacred’
Is the most precious thing.
That which is unpartitioned.
That reaches roads longed for.
That unfurls sky landscapes unbounded.
That is the most precious.
That fills and empties and makes whole possible.
That wraps meaning in glory and silence.
That goes beyond meaning to mean more.
That flows beyond edges still singing.
That is utter silence enfolding, accepting.
That swells and feeds and gives succour.
That cannot be defined by limitations.
That is beyond and within.
The engine of breath,
The longing to exterminate failure.
To awaken, to sparkle, to feel more, to perceive more.
To stand on the edge of a precipice,
To leap and let go and not care.
To recalibrate, to forget.
To sing eternally.
To be welcomed home.
To be unsullied.
To become the story.
To be magnified.
An infinite expanse of meaning,
A means to go beyond here.
The awen – an inflowing and an outflowing.
Exhilaration.
It can possess but cannot be possessed.
That which carries us away.
Exponential expansion of fractal geometries.
Everlasting metaphor.
Edge of the mysterious void.
Extinction of destruction.
Edges dissolve
And we expand
Into the sacred more.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, landscape, landscape photography, language, Poetry, rain, storm, thought, time, Wales, Winter on February 28, 2020| 1 Comment »
.
STORM WIND
.
We cannot outrun the storm wind
We cannot outrun the rain.
.
Between the lines appear the shapes of other letters.
.
The moment the tongue finds a shape to express a feeling.
The moment the feeling swells, a flower
Of song blossoms out.
.
We cannot outrun the swollen river
We cannot outrun the racing cloud.
.
Every thread laid and lost within the weave.
To hold one thought, just one,
When the roaring chord that rocks the pines
Sweeps the world away in ragged tatters.
.
We cannot outrun the world of sorrow
We cannot outrun this tide of time.
.
The meaning here
Is not the meaning
We seek.
.
We cannot outrun the storm mind
We cannot outrun the candle’s shadow.
.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, bardic, consciousness, landscape, landscape photography, language, memory, mind, nature, photography, Poetry, song on February 10, 2020| 2 Comments »
CLOTHED
Clothing himself in these common borrowed words,
A certain style, a certain habit, turns it all around.
Anonymous ubiquity becomes an intimate paced voice,
The poet emerges from the rough hedge glowing in the darkening evening.
Everyone has seen the full moon a thousand times,
Yet still now sighs and stands still.
Clothing ourselves in another’s memory
Or dreaming a dream not even ours:
The profoundest philosophy here,
A truth of who we are, think we are,
Where our edges blur and meet,
Where our voices change key and tone,
And slip into accents unfamiliar,
Where we stop being who we think we are,
And for a moment, if only ever for a moment,
We leap from the endless river, glinting and free
Into unfamiliar harvests of air and evening
On the floating view of somewhere we can never stay,
Returning so rapidly to the noisy rush of time and space,
Swept downstream, singing tunes with a cadence now not ours,
Now not solely ours.
—
simonhlilly 