Posted in Uncategorized, tagged nature, Poetry, time, Winter, winter solstice on December 25, 2021| Leave a Comment »
HEART
Heart anchored to this land.
No need for more questions.
The slow breath of seasons.
An Ivy road that clings and wanders
About the steep sides of Mynydd Troed.
This voiceless white sky calls
Into a vast unknown.
Three days stand still:
The cold of motionless time.
Take it to heart.
Let the silence of it
Dwell there a while.
–
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Autumn, Bardic rant, consciousness, landscape, landscape photography, nature, Otherworlds, Poetry, rain, the numinous, this world, time, Wales on October 31, 2021| 3 Comments »
HARD RAIN
Hard rain washing the world away.
Leaves fall through cooling air.
The gutters are singing an autumn song.
Rivers wake from summer’s sleep.
I was dreaming of eagles and their turquoise voice
In the days where darkness drums down more suddenly
And the cold cannot any longer be shrugged off.
I was dreaming of a path that was a spiral
And a spiral that was a mirror.
I stand before a silent oak.
Its name is eternal song,
Retribution, its door.
Its mouth is darkness.
In the end we do not know what matters.
This curl of sound, this exhalation of breath
Might be enough for a universe to be complete.
I study the taste of this turquoise,
Turn it between cold fingers
Then walk into the hill ( for all hills are doorways).
If you follow the hare, the path shall lie
Flat as grass before a strong wind.
If you follow the deer, the path shall be
Dappled and filled with birdsong.
If you follow the otter, the path will be
Silver and smooth as moonlight.
If you follow the dead,
Returning to their places,
You shall find your path
To womb and fireside
And questions: why and whereto.
All the warm singing halls
Lost in mist and blood.
All the familiar is a lie.
The world is utter strangeness
And the stars, known but unnamed.
I have been a trowel, an eagle, a pen.
What has been put together, falls apart.
These dreams you do not own.
Each is borrowed to keep you warm.
The path is a name you do not know.
This world is all the clue you will get.
Wrapped and unwrapped, each day a reminder.
There is no greater fool than a poet,
No greater truth than the lie of poetry.
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 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 art, consciousness, landscape, landscape photography, nature, Poetry, summer, summer solstice, time, Wales on June 28, 2021| Leave a Comment »
SOLSTICED
.
Garth Bank is a mind
Resting in silence.
.
Bryn and Y Garn
Become domed and spacious.
Valley rivers make no noise-
The whole world stands still.
.
The cold of eternal space
Touches the edge
Of our certainty.
.
So we cling
To an ephemeral fullness
And watch a blue distance
Grow warm in haze,
.
Nested in comfortable notions,
The children of cracked worlds.
–
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, assumptions, cuckoos, freedoms, habit, inevitability, landscape, landscape photography, Mabinogi, nature, Poetry, prophecy, time, Wales, William Blake on June 15, 2021| Leave a Comment »
A CUCKOO IN THE NEST
A cuckoo see-saws in the sunny dregs of May.
All the fractured warriors, pale and bloodless,
Sink into the seed-filled soil.
The winners and losers are the ones
Who laid out these fine roads.
So we can trust no other paths
Through the oak deep woods and sun-warmed cliffs.
They have buried their gold here and there
Like dinosaur eggs, cold hope and useless,
Without the thrusting love of bees.
We shall walk among the dead and borrow their dreams.
Bred for an ostentatious perfection
The roses strangled by a sea of happy weeds.
Yet we take the rose for our badge:
The blowsy, failing, propped and preening dream
Of old men and fanatics, and fight the weeds together.
The cuckoo mocks the sunny morning.
Innocence supplanted by an unbuilt guile.
The world see-saws on precipitance.
The stars, at least, remain, untouched
By this busy arrogance of being.
How many times shall I sing the same song,
O, Enitharmon? Until the long grey rains
Wash all footsteps away?
Gronw, Gronw, that stone over your heart shall not save you.
It will be laid out: the failings of desire and the roads of gold.
It shall all be sundered by the returning soul,
The tides of people, a song of weeds.
Sweet smelling idiots, the tiered hierarchies of perfect moments.
We have longed for its return – the resonant, ephemeral cuckoo.
But now its constant echo palls. It is no bard, but pure politician.
It ousts the futures of others, counts away choices, one by one.
The roads that are reasonable, are inevitable.
You had the choice a long time ago, if you recall, to be a hero
Or to fall safely into those ruts of good and equitable habit.
We have been charmed down from the tree now,
Given a voice, and we must fill the role assigned us.
To heave the future from its nest, watch it crack
Against the stones, and pray for food to still sustain us.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged history, landscape, nature, Poetry, seasons, spring, time, Wales on June 3, 2021| 1 Comment »
CUCKOOS
Cuckoos in the woods by Llwyngweision
Where the bluebells are almost, almost.
And curlews have been heard again by Cefngast.
The world teeters on the brink of this and that,
As it has always been.
A moment of sunlight,
A morning of rain.
The blackcap and the blackbird,
Their music amongst the pines and gravestones,
Recalling, recalling, forgetting, forgetting.
Annabelle is to open up the chapel
For one who searches names of a lost family.
Sunlight will warm the dust there,
The chill bones of God smiling at the sound of voices.
She knows the names and stories
Of a hundred years, almost.
When she is gone it will all be scattered in the winds, most likely,
And fall in flakes like the carved names of holy ground,
Illegible and smudged in pools of slow pale lichen.
The past scooped out and swept away –
The grinning smooth rocks when the rivers here lies low
In their dark green scars.
Hold it all lightly, then.
The mornings come and go.
A squabble of sparrows,
One slow bee meanders under the windowsill.
–
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, being, consciousness, cosmology, deep ecology, life, nature, Poetry, stars, the dead, time, transformation on May 16, 2021| Leave a Comment »
—
BONES
Do you hear your bones speaking?
Of the groaning glaciers and the ice waters
Released from the dark caves.
Of the small things you do not weigh up.
Of the large things, so large you are oblivious.
Of the earth swaying on tip-toe
To see the glorious horizons
That the gods dream of.
Of the rumble of sunlight
Piercing the hillside cairns.
Of the feathered footsteps
Of the reborn.
Under the still shade of the yew trees
Your bones speak,
But all you feel is fear.
The tipping point, the cliff edge.
Fingertips turn to pinions,
A hunger for corpses.
You can never steal the gold
That is the due of the gods,
Nor the silver that is the blood of the moon.
It shall all be returned.
That is what your bones say.
–
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 art, belonging, consciousness, landscape, landscape photography, mystery, nature, Poetry, Wales on April 26, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Take away the words
( that give stories to the silences of doubt)
And there is still the song of the river,
The roaring in the pines,
The light rolling over the ever-changing hills.
Mist rises and the clouds roll past.
There is no need to fill the seconds,
That are already so full of mystery,
With anything other than this.
We are ghosts
Unless we feed on this glory.
We are starved of succour,
Only feeding on our own reasons.
Offer your silence, now and then,
In the early morning, in the dusk.
Now and then, listen
To how eternity sings.
–
simonhlilly 