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Posts Tagged ‘Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains’

THE COMPETITION : 3 Prophecy of Glory

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Sunlight shines on the hills over there,

Above Beulah, between heaven and earth.

Watch it alight upon Allt-y-gest, upon Garn Wen.

It strokes the steep valley sides with glory.

We wear the crowns that others have made.

A moment in the sun, a hope it might remain.

The rivers are nearly dry here now,

Their voices silenced, their motion stayed.

If it rains in the mountains

The rivers shall rejoice here.

Thunder in the hills,

And then floods will be upon us

In the parched plains.

This glory steps up to us

Like a gift from the Tylwyth Teg,

A moment of gold in the late afternoon,

Before groping twilight shrouds in stillness

All but the endless dancing midges.

Sunlight now is on the bright brow of the hill.

Sing your song, then return to silence.

All the waters of the world are one river.

A moment of sparkling beauty is shared by all,

The passing sunlight, the rising moon,

The susurration of a million stars.

We rise and fall in a perpetual choir.

Sing to your soul, and be still.

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The minutes crack open and bleed cold.

Breath is chapped and hesitant in semi-quavers, a minor key.

The hawk is ice that hunts unrepentant the mountain heights.

Slay complacent warmth, the fickle needs of small hearts.

The flutter of joy, cackle of crow.

A silent field: whiteness extends to the very mists of deep mind.

Carved walls at the edges of space, words written there:

We are extinguished and free.

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ALDER FOLD

Singing severed head

Folds and puts away

The blanket of space,

Rolls away time.

A comfort against poisons,

A comfort against memory.

Sunlit is the hall,

Spacious with birdsong.

The sound of the sea

In the sound of the words.

And there is no greater magic than this.

By the shore, by the river,

By the evening light,

By the dividing of the roads.

One gasp and it will be gone.

Floating down stream,

Lodged in the mud

Of a new world.

The root of the tongue.

The cotyledon of sight.

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BHAIRAV (THE WEIGHTLESS WEIGHT OF AIR)

Air.

Flowing river from mountains cooled,

And the passion of stars

Piercing the bow of Time.

Air.

Layering droop and singing yet

On the long slope of dawn.

Air.

Tinted blue yet.

Twisted warm and wan.

Twisted slow, rolling.

Air.

Dreaming pulses

As reasons’ reflection

But vague yet.

Vague and languid,

At edges stalled.

Moistened in sleep,

But not.

But not.

Air.

Piled deep

Down to the stars.

Life sways hanging, drifting.

Trees with their hair

Loose and swaying

Singing, singing,

Down to the starlit voids

Hanging the tidal edges

The endless full innocent darkness.

Air.

The trees shape

Single syllables

Howled whisps of vowels

Finding froth from feeling.

Air

Patterned, pressured, punctured

Parcelled.

Air

Twisted and released,

Spread out and stretching,

Tidal current

The vapours caress

Their gradient glacial moments.

Air

Sun bright now

Shifting shimmering.

It suffers all thought.

Turning about

Returning it to silence.

Air.

Sun-bright now,

Spirit-filled

Song-filled

The tongue of gods

Hungry for this and that.

It will not

It will not.

It will

It will.

Invisible lover of every surface.

Air.

It stretches, it pulses.

Gods are born from air.

They flow in and out,

Grow fists of nothing.

They flow in and out.

Gods born from

The turbulent throbs of air.

Movement shiver shafts.

Silence

Silence.

Bhairav is a well-known Indian raag of the early morning. I have only recently grown to love it and its variations. Perhaps the tense sharps and flats put me off. It has the energy of cool space, of heights, of growing light, of distance, of precise wing-tips, of soaring wings, of the dip and soar of red kites. This is a sort of verbal alap – a slow exploration of the moods and directions of morning air, here in the mountains.

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THEIR NAMES

Their names are the doors they wait behind.

Dreaming, dreaming, they thus dream us.

A silver moon scythes the snow fruit that admits us.

Timeless is the round dance of breath.

There is constant war in heaven, and hunting,

And fast, hot seduction.

How else, otherwise, could it be here?

The stars pour themselves into the hills.

There will be ice upon the marshes.

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The sky rolls out from them, these hills

that witness all that moves round here.

Catching the last light in shadowed hands;

Sending breezes billowing through the rolling valley oaks.

They drop their white veils and dream of prophecies

That do not end in utter silence.

Their answer is in streams and tumbled stones

That last almost forever, almost.

And catch and keep the hearts of small and nested things,

To keep them safe until it is time to take them back to night

And to that other dreaming.

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GIVEN TIME

Given time

All the stones return.

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Companionship, the soft moss

That greens broken voices.

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We are accustomed to abandonment

Where roads turn back

Leaving the high hills to themselves.

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We are accustomed to the tides

Of disdain from those

Who cannot see our wealth.

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We breathe free in cloud and soft rains,

In the glance of sun,

In the silent press of snow.

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What we lack

Has been given away freely.

Nothing of worth

Has been lost.

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From the darkening skies

A single feather falls.

The stones are silent.

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Penygarngoch rises from the past,

A whale of rock, green draped,

Through the hayfields and meadow mists.

Rising above the lowing cattle,

Rising above the blackcap’s song.

Higher than the raven’s tumble,

Higher than the roads and pathways.

The present does not wash it clean of memory.

It does not replace the layers accumulated,

The dust of starlight, the tombs of kings.

In its deep roots, in its trickling waters,

In its sedge and scrub and bracken,

In its clear-eyed dreaming head,

In its separate, aloof completeness,

In its drawing out of silence,

In its dome of watchfulness,

It rises higher into the sun.

Both consonant and vowel,

Both noun and verb.

A rounded arc that restfulness adheres to.

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July is a slow river.

It slides behind a mirror sky

Smoothed by silence and bees

A breeze of roses and sweeping swallows,

A sweet weight of honeysuckle.

The hay is cut between rains.

It lies in long warm lines.

Certainty and uncertainty

Is what we live with.

Storing up what keeps us.

Everything is harvested in its own time.

The western wall carries the sun’s warmth

Well past the white skies of midnight.

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MAY MORNING ROAD

I shall set before me this road,

Laid out across the misty cool morning.

I shall set it to wander between

What I know and what the world knows.

The light that pushes through the stretched hopes

Stretches green and upwards

Where the clouds melt and thin

To impossible blue.

I shall tie this road here

And let it wander between it all.

Gods would fight an eternity to be here.

They would gather murmuring like bees

To be fed on this transient translucence.

It moves lightly, this road, with nowhere to go.

It revolves around its own curiosity,

A certain lightness, familiar but untrodden.

It tastes a certain way, delicate between the cuckoos.

It will go a distance

Before it finds

It has not moved at all.

Admittance to the centre of all things.

It shimmers with breath,

This May morning road.

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