Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Autumn, landscape, nature, Poetry, stormy weather, trees, Wales, wind on November 17, 2020| 4 Comments »
THE TREES
.
the trees have
become skeletons now,
.
this year’s flesh
stripped off by storms.
.
we are becoming the dead
And breathe
that spice perfume
Of cold and
mulch and sleep.
.
the wind lifts the skirts
of the morning.
.
we see nothing there
except clattering bones.
.
all our neat
and sensible power
evaporates.
.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Autumn, landscape, nature, Poetry, song, Taliesin, Wales, words on October 27, 2020| Leave a Comment »
WHOSE EYE
Whose eye now rests unblinking?
These sorrowful scattered things.
Whose perfect recollection
Recites names and causes?
Who knows and can name
The wide, free roads to destruction?
Is it that there is only ever one timeless voice,
Bright-browed and sharply bitter,
A wormwood for awakening?
Slew the game and shift the form,
It can never break from the following cloud.
The storm crow cries,
Carrion falls to feed new flocks.
Day and night is his mouth.
Dawn and sunset, dusk and midnight.
They are dreaming
Who listen to that song
Dreaming it is their dream alone.
There is peace beneath
The storm of words.
One world anchoring
The roaring others.
Gather back your souls, lost and scattered.
From this forest undergrowth.
From the peeling skies.
From the long dust roads.
Gather them in the heart of a song
That will not brook nor break.
One season returning with bright fruit.
One prayer reaching the throne of the Creator.
All this is the debris of glory.
The gold that feeds the gods-
These autumn grasses are brighter,
These few days, more precious.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Autumn, belonging, change, landscape, landscape photography, mortality, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, Poetry, rain, seasons, Taliesin, time on October 23, 2020| Leave a Comment »
RISING, RETURNING
Rising through mist and rust and gold.
The rain coming and going and the oaks holding on.
History repeating itself, as it always does,
And the eternal poets weeping and laughing
In their sunlit words.
We shall reach home soon, as we always do,
Until the very last time when time shall slow and stop,
And the oaks, only, will be holding on then
In rust and gold and sunlit drifts.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancient woods, death, landscape, landscape photography, mortality, nature, Pembrokeshire, Poetry, secret places, the past, Wales on October 7, 2020| 4 Comments »
TY CANOL WOOD
It is a narrow house, the wood that is made for eternity.
A smoke of dream shivering upwards into air.
The roots of it smoulder below, flame-leaves lick.
It is a narrow house we are born into.
So much that cannot be reached, cannot be known.
The paths wander between moss boulders and broken bedrock,
clothed in thick green life.
Constrained by thin earth, yet they all do seem to dance,
and at night, some say, they walk
and the rock creaks open,
light spilling from golden halls,
and that unnerving perfect music, too.
A narrow road and a narrow house we have set ourselves,
But that is not the world’s way.
She dances and throws it all away in broad gesture,
Sings at the central hearth, though no-one listens much,
and knows that song is food for every soul.
Feels the billowing thunder head, this haze of gnats,
the invisible silver threads beneath,
and the chains of finest gold,
and the footprints of old gods between the stars,
that is birdsong here
in Ty Canol Wood.
—
This ancient small woodland in Pembrokeshire is named from the nearby house, Ty Canol, ( the central, middle, house). It has links to Otherworld inhabitants, and has a definitely magical atmosphere. Here I am contrasting the open, generous quality of the natural world with the restricted experience of mortality and human perception. The coffin is sometimes traditionally referred to as a narrow house and the tomb to a house of earth.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, history, landscape photography, nature, Pembrokeshire coast, Poetry, roads, Strumble Head, time, Wales, weather on August 15, 2020| 2 Comments »
ON STRUMBLE HEAD
A scribble the shape of ghost emotion
locked in a dark of its own
eroded by slow dissipations.
Attenuated solidity, it dusts and fragments,
worn to grit and feathers – like the scoop of ravens
haunting the far and airless void of fractured cliff.
.
So it is the sun shines down this stooping lane.
So it is the sky stretches out cloud as thin as yesteryear
down to a sea-wet sunset.
.
This scribble root of gorse, buried and unburied
in a wall of lost time, scuffed by sheep,
peeled back by tooth of buck rabbit
and the hungry fox who is a poet for worms
and small chances in the night.
.
We slope down, we slope down,
a curved limb and a slow-motion fall.
The land reaches out, reaches out,
so in love it is with the distant perfect horizon.
The whitest lighthouse walls, a geometric parable of steps,
a blessing and a curse of isolation.
Here, it says,
not here, it says,
you are going, have gone,
astray.
.
This tower of the last word, reaching upwards in rain and spume.
A dancer, as a tree is, as a gorse bush is,
straining against gravity and used to failing beautifully
with grace and a small distance in the smile,
a cool distance where perfection lingers before it melts.
.
A ringing landscape song: thin lanes,
long and running bravely to thin air.
Dead ends, dead endings where the ravens wait
soaring up the world’s edges,
soaring up to taste the distant crashing,
testing the resilience of time against
the pump of heartbeats.
.
Small things matter, so close we are here to edges,
where the wind throws all opposition down
and the pastel fragile seasons
dress and undress eternal moments.
There is a transparency in the air
above Strumble Head, a wind-blown kiss,
a word of farewell.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged archetypes, bardic, Branwen, consciousness, cosmology, Crow and White Crow, death, division of self, landscape photography, loss, Mabinogion, mind, mythic patterns, nature, photography, Poetry, primal division of consciousness, Second Branch, soul loss, time, transformation, Wales on July 7, 2020| 1 Comment »
LOST 1
My white winged soul is over the sea,
Low over the silver waters,
Far from sight, for duty
And the hope of peace.
Gone from this world,
Gone from the next,
Spiralling down to earth
To scour the debris of other’s joy.
There is some small joy in loss,
But not this loss.
Settled and content were we,
As rocks on a sun-warmed hillside
( the popping of gorse, the dust of heather,
the impermanent river of skylarks).
Settled and content, rippled in sheltered shade
(the hum of bees, the dance of gnats).
But each change brings irrevocable change.
Worlds end at every whim,
The ruins dreaming in emptied desolation.
Time, a syncopated stutter
To relive or forget in themes.
The moment before death –
An unravelling of strategy and excuses.
Something pure there, something silent,
Something wrapped beneath the pain and sorrow,
Something unutterably sweet, something eternal flickers
Before the moment and the light dies.
Before the terrible glorious cauldron darkness,
The seething dice thrown before dawn
Where we have lost our voices
And must learn to sing again,
Sound by sound.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, empty skies, Haiku-ish, landscape, landscape photography, light, most sapphire deep, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, plague, Poetry, sky, spring on May 20, 2020| Leave a Comment »
THE HEALED SKY
The healed sky
Blue as the calm gaze
Of the Medicine Buddha.
May all beings find peace.
—
The healed sky.
Wherever we go
The chanting of honey bees.
—
The healed sky.
A deeper peace creeps in,
Silence no longer a threat.
—
The healed sky.
Eternal mind
Ever returning to life.
–
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art photography, landscape, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, Poetry, spring, spring equinox, time, Wales, weather on March 22, 2020| Leave a Comment »
NOT YET
If you go a little way from here,
Down to the valleys and towards the towns
You will see the surprise of green:
The hawthorn hedges already plump with budding,
Blackthorn blossom scattered and the slim beginnings of willow.
But not here.
The hill is waiting yet, as its people waits,
In no rush to lose the cold, clear skies.
Still breathing deep and slow the muddy mulch and bracken,
The silent puddled lanes that measure
The stretching days and spin of stars.
There, (here and there), even a cherry, young and impatient.
Even the black ash swells.
But not here,
Except the elder has begun to heal its emptiness.
One more bright day.
One more clear night
And we shall be full of lambs and birdsong.
But not yet.
Not here,
Not yet.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged landscape, nature, Poetry, rain, Wales, weather on March 11, 2020| Leave a Comment »
THE LOVELY RAIN
The lovely rain –
Its breath is music
In the chapel pines.
.
What we have left
Of what is done
Is debris.
.
The lovely rain.
Chapel pines hum,
Eyes closed and swaying.
Cool is the air.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged annwfn, art, awen, bardic, biosphere, landscape photography, message, metaphysics, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, mystery, nature, Poetry, prophecy, storm, the dead, the numinous, time, timelessness, transformation, Wales, weather, Winter on February 21, 2020| Leave a Comment »
ORACULAR MESSAGE
In the woods, in the green wet woods
The dead are waiting with their songs.
.
They have longed for their flesh and they have forgotten.
The rivers are full of their passions.
It is a cold steel desire, a lust like winter.
.
It is gone now, subsided into multiplicity,
The tracks lost, the flash of prey in the bushes,
All become unintelligible like a valley dissolves in driving rain.
.
But the dead are waiting there with their slim fingers
To crack open your sight, to break open your eyes
The release the hawk of your mind, the hungry raven of your heart,
The river of your reason.
.
This is for you, a prophecy for you
Because you have read these lines,
Because of the intersections of the stars,
Because you are nothing but this,
About to be forgotten, about to be lost.
.
The dead are waiting in the woods, singing and dancing,
Forgetting everything.
.
You have dreamed enough.
You have destroyed enough.
.
They slide between species, have no regard for distinctions.
They breathe the matter ejected from shuddering galaxies into the void.
.
These words are not for you
But you must remember them and pass them on.
They are for the last one who leaves.
Who turns to flick the light switch
And with a small smile steps into darkness.
.
Tell them the dead are waiting in the green mossy woods.
Tell them to listen for the sighing song
For the surprise of pine scent drift singing storm winds.
Tell them to remember the small things,
The notions that eat worlds.
Tell them the dead are waiting
To take them home.
.
