Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bardic, consciousness, landscape photography, metaphysics, nature, Poetry, ritual, teachings, tree spirits on August 17, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Tree spell ritual
The world breathes through me
and I am full of trees.
Silent teachers fill the silence;
Patterns dance at the surfaces of light.
Through doorways I dissolve
And am reborn with bones of truth.
Made whole and healed with cloaks of song.
Anchored, rooted, nurtured, sustained.
Harmlessly unfurled, patiently watching.
I am full of trees, dreamed by trees.
Ruthlessly harmless, sustained in emptiness.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, landscape photography, language, midsummer, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, openness, Otherworld, Poetry, politics, time, transcendence, Wales on August 13, 2019| 3 Comments »
The Doors of Midsummer
A breath of cloud moves east across Y Garn’s face.
Words are as scarce as swallows in a cold summer.
Anyway, anyway, they only grow from dream to tangled lie,
flowering like the bindweed covering all beneath,
Weighing down, weighing down until nothing else remains.
The doors have opened in every hill,
An invitation to join the dance and summer’s feast.
But we are taught to doubt generosity,
To look for the trap in openness and goodness
(nothing is true that comes so free and easy).
River and clouds are the rulers of this world
and they move on in their own time, unbidden.
Tune to a key that sings of endlessness, even though
no one here knows anything of that song.
For emotion is born from time and loss:
In timeless halls is no such thing.
No such thing but endless dance and bliss.
If the summer never ends
It will be a hard winter, here.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged nature, photography, Poetry, summer, Wales, wisteria on July 5, 2019| 3 Comments »
FUJI (wisteria)
By the cottages of Penrhos,
Letting the warm wall take its weight.
Resting on the earth like a mountain does.
Leaning gnarled, an old man supports himself.
When time comes, his tongue flowers
Eloquent strings of song,
After the frosts have gone
And before the long rains.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged landscape, landscape photography, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, Poetry, seasons, summer, Wales on June 24, 2019| 3 Comments »
THE HEDGES
The hedges hawthorn foam.
Precise time ceased and waiting.
A mist to smudge everything not near.
And a blue cool watchfulness
Before slow, large drops of rain.
Hills, and hills behind the hills, we see.
Hills and hills in the heart of the land.
Inch by inch they choose green
Over wan winter brown.
Inch by inch they swell and sing
Sated with descending arcs of summer stars
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged awareness, cold, consciousness, first frost, nature, night, Poetry, season's change, small life, stars on October 28, 2018| 3 Comments »
SMALL THINGS
To die on a winter’s night
And know that your last breath
Will be eaten by a million
Cold and hungry stars.
These flakes of furred life
Curled around their small souls
Encircled by great horizons
That ever suck the warmth
From fast-beating hearts.
No hardship, though, in letting go.
In leaving the fury, in leaving
The dawn cold to other hunters
And the sharp songs in bare branches
And the sharp eyes longing to peck.
To need no need now, to rise and fly,
To become incorporeal, incorporated
In the memory of an ever-loving world,
The blanketed round and sweet murmured world.
_
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.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, ciontinuity, history, landscape, landscape photography, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, Poetry, Wales on September 2, 2018| Leave a Comment »
Our Geography (1)
Our geography is mellow and tear-washed,
meandering and mud-stained.
It dreams through mist and slanting rains,
bites its lip and grasps the rooted valley sides.
It sends out messengers and bards
on posts and cries their hovered song.
It wears its history against a fickle, fast future;
views as unbecoming the speed of our own descent.
Though welcomes us back always
to its folded silences.
—
