Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, art, bardic, cold, consciousness, landscape, landscape photography, metaphysics, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Poetry, the numinous, time, Winter on March 13, 2022| Leave a Comment »
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.
–
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, Poetry, Wales on September 29, 2021| Leave a Comment »
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.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, belonging, forgiving, hills, landscape, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, peace, photography, Poetry, politics, Wales on August 14, 2021| Leave a Comment »
GIVEN TIME
Given time
All the stones return.
.
Companionship, the soft moss
That greens broken voices.
.
We are accustomed to abandonment
Where roads turn back
Leaving the high hills to themselves.
.
We are accustomed to the tides
Of disdain from those
Who cannot see our wealth.
.
We breathe free in cloud and soft rains,
In the glance of sun,
In the silent press of snow.
.
What we lack
Has been given away freely.
Nothing of worth
Has been lost.
.
From the darkening skies
A single feather falls.
The stones are silent.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Cambrian Mountains, deep ecology, hills, July, landscape, memory, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, Poetry, time, Wales on July 21, 2021| Leave a Comment »
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.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged consciousness, landscape, light, morning, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, Poetry, seasons, time, Wales on May 5, 2021| 1 Comment »
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.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged landscape, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, Poetry, spring, time, Wales, weather on April 6, 2021| Leave a Comment »
LANK GRASS
Lank grass leaks light.
Meagre is the wan sun.
The hillside’s low shudder
Shoulders a cold wind.
To and fro the white flocks weave.
The black flocks waver, settle
And disperse in fields.
Time does not pass
That is not sweetly savoured:
Cloaking us in eternal radiance,
An infinity of brilliant shadow.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged being, Cambrian Mountains, consciousness, February, landscape, mortality, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Poetry, spring, the numinous, time, Wales, weather on March 12, 2021| Leave a Comment »
A RAINBOW WALKS
A rainbow walks the yellow hill.
Small birds know that Spring is coming.
The wide-winged hawks, too, wheel and watch.
The rain has reached us now,
Tapping the roof.
Our skies yawn wide here:
From the Radnor hills right round
Through Crychan forest and the hidden dive
To the Sugarloaf and the low lands beyond.
Epynt is the wall of centuries behind us,
The deep valleys of the Cambrians, an uncertain present.
The old stones have been removed,
Or lost, that pinned us to hope.
The roads run thin and crumble.
If you live forever, all this is of no consequence.
If you live one year, or two,
This doubt and uncertainty is extravagance.
Many hereabouts conjure their own futures
From a past they grasp as if it were theirs.
As well to leave it be, leave it be.
There is no power here but a rainbow
Walking, for a moment, the yellow hill.
And the flow of wind and cloud across the horizon
No one can see beyond.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Haiku-ish, landscape, landscape photography, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, Poetry, seasons, Winter on February 28, 2021| Leave a Comment »
VIEW
Hokusai would appreciate the view:
Garth Bank rising like a sleepy Fuji
Framed by those leaning pines
And the placid, silent sky.
He would have changed nothing,
But chosen the lines for beauty
And the colours calm and dun as the day.
A landscape without pearls,
Though edged by snow hills.
One by one we lose our weight,
Floating upwards to eternity.
The two rivers whisper it
In their deep and hidden ways.
I catch the scent of planed hinoki.
Last day of January.
–
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Autumn, Haiku-ish, landscape, landscape photography, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, Poetry, silence, the numinous, time, Wales, weather on February 8, 2021| Leave a Comment »
TWO DISTANT MOMENTS
.
I breathe the cool cloud
The jackdaws lean into.
The spice of wet grass.
A radiant moment dissolves into eternity.
.
Evening turns to rust.
The blue hills bloom cloud.
Soft, this beautiful melancholy.
.
simonhlilly 