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Posts Tagged ‘nature’

DAWN CHORUS AND MOMENTS OF FROST

As if this feather, slow-turning, falls,
One breath of ice, branching blades
Arcing ghosts of fern, arced ghost of forests.
Pinioned cold, eager, aware, edge fractured.
Fingertips feeling for pattern, the familiar
Stretched pale, translucent.

As the scattered, sprinkled pierce of sound,
Woven between moonlit pale dawn wind,
Tumbling, cascades and choirs,
A flurry of beak and breast-soft down.

As all life joined up by song,
No less, no more meaning than this.
Small hearts full and pouring,
The vessel, vehicle, of the world.

No more and no less than this:
The opening of small mouths,
The fast tremble of accepting hearts.
Light now, and slow revolutions through space.

This place, placement, placid, pellucid.
Transcendent fingers frosting fine feathers,
Growing, though not grasping,
Water flowers framed in ice.

Small time, halted, crystalline.
Slow arcs of how things are,
How they happen.
Seen, unseen, diverted, amalgamated.
Dawn chorus and the moments of frost.
Suspended breath, then
Light and song.
No more, nor no less
Than this.

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TALLIS EXULTANT

Golden moon rests
Upon a throne of low cloud.

All night long-
As bright as day.

Dawn shall not diminish her:
Sinking radiant
Into new lands.

A long music,
A choir of days.
Tallis exultant.

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DUET
(two ghosts in blue mirror).

a spontaneity of words by Simon Lilly and Jessica Ryan. This began when I commented on a picture Jessica published alongside her blog just before Christmas. http://soveryvery.wordpress.com.
It turned out quite nicely, I think, so here it is:

That image is what?
Ordinary, unspectacular, mute,
but made something perfect
by colour,detail and the art of looking.
Ambience Radiating Truth,
a little art.

The light, the air,
the moment.
A conspiracy for
rather than against me.
Maybe art is just that –
a conspiracy for.

A pattern infiltrated
and worn upon oneself,
a brief belonging.

All too brief.
And we gasp.
And we grasp after
the flickering perfection
of the pattern, seen.

Seen is eaten by heart,
head not withstood
(though best ignored
or humoured with thin smiles).
Seen is been seen,
marked by all, included, amongst.
We are twill, tweed, embroidered,
embroiled regardless of high or low regard.
Our guard is dropped,
melting into the passionless is.

Seen and consumed,
heart’s regard (less more high low)
is consummated.
Our guard,
an empty collection of warp and weft,
never understood the story of orange and blue.

A tunnelling path
carved through flickering time,
framed roads, named, unnamed,
tasted with hesitant tongue, delighted ear.
Pulsed, a walking rhythm,
a posy of moments, empty and full.
Shall we walk together down the long evenings,
birdsong and laughter,
or fear the empty bridge,
the shallowed gold pit?

A pocket full.
Ignore the hard edges
pretending the end.
The pellucid vibrancy spills out,
centers the path tickling the birdsong’s laugh
off of our tongues.
And so we shall.
What else to do with bursting moments
but walk the gloaming?

The gloomy gloaming
of the joker tomb.
Mock serious and smirking.
It cannot hold a moment longer,
bursting with radiate light.
We can afford generosity,
shedding skins, attaining orbits.
Starlit, wandering,
trying out new names with new lips,
forgetting, laughing at footprints:
leaf litter on an autumn path.

Lost once, lost twice,
a cliff of thought,
a tunnelled, mysterious evening.
Mapled flutter,
mapled collapse, mapled incense.
Hesitant even,
hastened steps, a whispered wind,
a small bowl of sorrow,
a small bowl of delight.

I’ve dreamed of a third bowl,
wobbling on its edge.

Its sound is round,
debating gravity and stillness.
A heart or notion, a simple holding,
a significator, the dreamer mirrored dream,
a season, a map, a world of half light and half dark,
rotating,
a long whispered vowel.

A calling between consonants.
Aggravating the spin,
hand to hand among the maple trim.
The cartography of my heart,
studied in your grin,
the sugar portending a notion of splendor
made dormant.
The punctuation pauses,
cupped, before the sound begins.

A sweet sound.
A sweet silence.
That path between, slyly negotiated:
a low sigh.

The rustle of the blood’s report.
The mirrored blush shies cheek
and dropping leaf.
Is this the place
where it all starts?

polarity door2

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NEW. YEAR’S DAY

A long blessing
Shunned and huddled against.
Rain in lines and columns –
Tall ghosts tramping flat the fields.
The valley crouches sodden,
Hill and distance dissolved to grey.
Things move as little as possible,
Only the sound of running water
Returning to restless distant seas.

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INSTANT IN SILENCE

How many this night
Will not see the dawn?
Will turn away
And in an instant, forget?
In silence, or with a sigh
One by one release the senses,
Taste the fragrance
Of every memory
Then let them scatter.

We are a drift, a chord,
Bound and loosed,
Spun strong and thin,
Too thin for even strong words
To hold for long.

Release this dream
To find another.

Solace and grace,
The scent of pine needles,
Birdsong in the morning,
A familiar voice
Calling from nearby.

Turn away,
Turn away.
Dawn can come at
Any time.

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SETTLED

So it is settled:
Cupped, hammocked
In golden hay fields,

The sun
Of this northern land
Free, for a week or two,
To proudly swell
In still, blue skies.

To warm brick and path
Long past sunset.
To pull trees starwards
In deep green shade,
Sheened with dust.

Nestled, the violet mallow
In golden grasses.
Nestled, the purple knapweed
Along the pasture edge.

The hedgerow elm,
Two years dead,
Swathed lush in ivy,
Crowned, adorned
In arcs of wild rose.

Life rushes in
Dressing old wounds:
White yarrow, pink yarrow.
Sudden sweet drift-
Overwhelmed by honeysuckle.
The fingers, white fingers
Of bindweed count the days.
Swallows sigh happy
Swinging high in evening.

It is a time of tasting,
Of breathing.

There is music,
There is silence,
I can find no difference.

There is one second,
There is the next,
Tell me, if you can,
Which is more perfect?

—-

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Ash, my tall and graceful one!
My sky-sweeping, rooted one!
Pillar of the upland airs,
Feather-leaved and blowsy one!
May you live forever
On the green meadow,
The cliff-side wood.

May you not decline
With the eastern wind
That blows unwitting death.
It is not hateful, nor malicious,
That small spored thing.
It is itself, longing to live,
Breathing when given space to breathe.
Happy to flourish free.

But all eat the other.
Each food delightful,
A means to be maintained,
And who can dare say
This one form has more need,
More right, than that other?

These hills, sighing open,
Green-pillared with ash and maple.
Sky-open, crow and jackdaw,
Hare and hawk,
Were once oak deep
’til cropped for pit and forge.
We ourselves so keen to scrape
And burrow, scratch and gather up.
Those stone walls now, too,
Broke and deserted, wooded once more.

Our curse in time, our measurement,
Our expectation.
Climbing into the hill country, (warm air,
Cool breeze), time clicks backwards
In increments,
By hours, by days, by weeks,
By months, by years.

Midsummer here
And the hawthorn still heavy,
Chestnut red and proud.
And the stone, the building,
The road, they slip back
To a century, two centuries, ago.
Time slowed in the hills,
Time holding on.
Like the ash, time growing tall
And bending – green time, leaved, roofed.
Time cherished, built up.

Our habitual curse:
A narrow view on time,
A time of coming and going,
A fragment of patterns
Made larger than horizons by life.
A horizon invisible, but for you,
Towering ash, standing
So fair and tall.

Today is enough.
Today is forever.
Weep not for what will be,
What will never be.

The green shadow cools
Down by the Derwent,
A haven for the silk sheen of ducks,
Their quiet chuckling graze in grass.
The goatsbeard turning to sleep at noon.

——


This collected around a journey up north into the Peak District of Derbyshire, the beginning of the Pennine uplands that run up the centre of England to the Borders of Scotland. The highest lands are sparse fields, stone walled, crow-haunted, with windbreaks of sycamore and beech. In the high valleys, steep and narrow, magnificent ash trees grow tall and broad. Here ash and maple (sycamore, great maple) take over from oak as the main woodland species.

Chalara fraxinea is the rather delightful name of the ash dieback fungus, first appearing in the forests of Poland quite a few years back. Since then it has made its way westwards devastating ninety-nine percent of Europe’s native ash trees. Now it has finally reached Britain. There is a slight hope that natural genetic diversity will allow five percent of trees to be resistant. It is very difficult to know what to do in the face of such changes. Life is a delicate, though robust, balance. The rise of one species and the decline of another is due to so many factors, and is part of the way things work here. We may favour the presence of one species over another, but our human view is always prejudiced by our habits and preferences. In the longer view of time, ninety-nine percent of all species that have ever existed here are extinct, and yet it all goes on. Who can say what life-form has more validity than another?

All we can offer is our appreciation for what is around us. Wishing all well. That may be all we can do. It may be the best we can ever do. It may be our sole purpose. To care for. To wish well. To cherish. Each day as it is.

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THERE SHOULD BE CUCKOOS

There should be cuckoos.
The warm silver clouds
Low with rain
Sheeting the high hills,
Green and weighed down
With yesterday’s light.

There should be cuckoos.
Floating, echoing hidden
Like a gong, like a memory
Turning over the still heart
Melting tight paths of thought,
Manifest distance.

There should be cuckoos.
Inhabiting every wooded fold
Deep in the world
Now settled, fruiting,
Slowly inturning, indwelling
Heading high to solstice
And then the long
Slow burn to harvest.

There should be cuckoos.
Now the hay is turned and gathered
Now creamy elder scents the air,
Worlds in worlds, layered, established.
Angels barefoot down the lanes,
Honeysuckle fingers, messages forgot.

There should be cuckoos
Measuring this loosening, this hollow,
Replacing thought and song
Answering all, settling all,
Letting go, adrift and floating.
Low clouds, rain heavy,
Warm air’s slow somersault
The swaying grasses, the rippling grasses.
From the green world’s roof,
From its rafters,
There should be cuckoos.

—–

(Ornithologically suspect, as cuckoos here in England usually call most in April, but it was the thought of cuckoos on a warm, cloud-filled day in June, that inspired this flow of words.)

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JUNE RAINS (haiku/haibun cycle)

Sudden gust of wind.
Rain-wet face.
These grey, empty streets.

These grey, empty streets:
I do not know their names.
They do not know mine.
A dream in cold dawn.

Too many words attached to memory. A posy of complaint, shades of all the colours of melancholy. Cast down, forgotten, they shall dissolve, mulch for future centuries. Beautiful air locating magical symbols. A play with syllabic sweetness, a river of sanity too far to touch.

A dream in cold dawn.
Somehow choosing a role
No-one else will have.

Is there a moment, a time, when each one of us decides our degree of visibility? Do we slip, collecting the well-worn clothes of a vacant consciousness, into comforting roles, familiar, mapped out? And so they adhere, become so owned. The first and the last in the queue. The sensible one, the designated driver, the quiet one, the strange one.

No-one else is here.
Squabbling sparrows
Scattering blossoms.
Rain-wet garden.

The colours have swiftly changed from the brightness of May to the weighed greens of June. Elder blossom is the punctuation, and the delicate scatter of wild roses. The bindweed curls, the honeysuckle prepares its longing fingers. The sun breeds cloud, sucks moisture and breathes storm.

No-one else will know
This one silent moment.
Rain wet garden.

Rain-wet garden
Flowers weighed down.
Unavoidable sorrow.

Unavoidable sorrow.
Thoughts falter.
The low-slung cry of swallows.

Low-slung cry of swallows
Steady rain
Strange emptiness.

Strange emptiness
Fills with peace.
Scent of wild roses.

Scent of wild roses:
Though they bend and weep
They know this rain a blessing.

—–

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MAY, KISSED

White puddle

Seed cools

Moon damp

Blue

Sky bed.

May dawn

Opening

Long-limbed,

Dewed.

Kissed, one

By one

Each fold

Each hollow.

Sun-covered,

Warmed,

Held.

****

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