Posted in Uncategorized, tagged army ranges, landscape, Mynydd Epynt, Poetry, spring on March 30, 2019| 4 Comments »
EXTRACTING BEAUTY FROM ENDLESS SORROWS
A fine Spring day
(though only a city-dweller
would believe that winter is over).
The thrush is singing
in the chapel pines
and on the hills
the thud of bombs.
A woodpecker is drilling
in the valley,
(or is it machine guns
over the ridge?)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged landscape, meditative mind, Mynydd Epynt, Poetry, Wales on March 20, 2019| 2 Comments »
CALM ABIDING ON WILD PONY MOUNTAIN
Facing the silent mountain
I sit listening to the wind.
Thoughts like streaming clouds
Come and go.
Only the weight of woven sunlight
Keeps me here, shaped by colours,
And the road through the valley
That promises still so much.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, bardic lands, geography, landscape, landscape photography, Mynydd Epynt, myth, Poetry, presence, Wales on December 12, 2018| Leave a Comment »
—
CWM DWFNANT (2)
(Our geography)
It does not dwell here
It does not stay.
Coming and going in mists
Dissolved to spirit
Absently haunting
The green valley quiet.
Its wings are white shadows
Milk dropped in pools
A cleft, a demure device,
Dark and luscious mystery
Hovered near madness
Far too far from reasonable reasons.
It dwells otherwise, a dark language
Spoken backwards.
Returning time to itself,
A rotating quern of years and miles.
A mighty sign at the corner of the eye.
Blessings to the world-weary
That strip the meat back to bone,
Break the bone to feed on sweet hidden marrow.
The lick of mist, the lick of its still wrist,
Far-flung, a throat of words
Pushed back deep into the hills.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged geography, Irfon Valley, landscape, Mynydd Epynt, photography, Poetry, Wales on November 26, 2018| Leave a Comment »
OUR GEOGRAPHY – CWM DWFNANT
It falls from other airs, some other whispers, other, other cries:
The echoed uplands out of sight that push the clouds
Where the ravens reach.
It wriggles itself fast into its folds,
carved back, a groove deep and dark,
slanted in forest and tumbled stone.
The road spins around it, a snake’s hiss,
slick and narrow, and the racing waters beneath it.
Its name is Stream from the Abyss, from the Deep,
from the Resounding Deep.
And it is loved by cloud so
And loved by mist so.
They cling to and nourish themselves there.
They are born there and are raised there.
Mysterious as poetry, its waters race down
From their hidden places, bright and ice cold,
stirred by shadows from worlds above and worlds below.
Cwm Dwfnant, a mouth that utters,
An eye that gazes heavy-lidded,
vision crowded,
Dream-wrapped.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Autumn, landscape, landscape photography, late summer, Mid Wales, Mynydd Epynt, Nant Crysan, nature, Poetry, Spite Inn, Wales on September 9, 2018| 8 Comments »
Our Geography –
Nant Crysan
The rowan reddening,
No drop of sunlight wasted;
And the dried grasses to feast on
For finch and siskin.
The blue forest, floating on heat and haze,
Is cool still, the sound of trickling water,
And a breeze far off
On the slopes of Esgair Fwyog.
A row of hills weighs again its thoughts,
The horizon still no nearer.
There, by Spite Inn, the buzzard
Peers from its high post:
Something will stir and food will come.
The world wastes nothing,
Passing on one to another.
The road turns because it must,
Rises because it must,
Falls because it must,
No god complaining.
The rivers of old walls,
The lines of fields left fallow.
And the old names:
The ridge of the runaway,
Haunted still ( the cry of hounds and the drip of fear);
the ridge of the tumbling waters,
Haunted by another sound – of
Gathered ravens and ripped, uprooted, roaring torrents.
This rise and dip of this land
Draped between named places
Always slows and deepens my breath:
The way the hills fold up to the sky,
The way the forests have been patted
Into neat lines at field’s edge,
The way the water of Nant Crysan moves slow
And hidden in the sedge-rippled meadows
Where the black cattle come and go,
The way the fences fall into their own calligraphy
And the gates open always,
always to empty, sighing sky.
—
simonhlilly 