Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, cold morning, dawn, landscape, landscape photography, mist, mountains, nature, Poetry, Wales, Winter on December 31, 2016| 14 Comments »
Ice Breath
Is it not true
That it is always the past
We burn to keep ourselves warm?
The young sun
Is on the tops now,
The deep valleys shadowed,
The mists let go, rise and melt away.
One slow hawk
Skims the treetops.
The cold, still sky
Has yet to choose its colour.
Ice will soon breathe,
relax to water,
Struck by the
warm weight
of light.
Those
that have survived
the night
Will stir
and sing.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Autumn, Haiku, nature, October, Poetry, Wales on October 13, 2016| 4 Comments »
october mornings
crows calling
gold drifts to ground
the smell of hills
pillow wind stills
crow echoes crow
falling golden
river road
car sighs by
clouds pile higher
Slow dawn tints all
hills mist and unfurl
then fade again
jackdaws’ monkey chant
a circle of clapping children
drums for good harvest
and kind winter
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dawn, Irfon Valley, landscape, light, nature, Poetry, river, space, sun, time, Wales on September 11, 2016| Leave a Comment »
DAWN AS BLUE
Dawn,
Blue as Mary’s robe ripped with tears
A new born sun all night under the earth
Bursts up golden forgetting forgiving all else.
The small things of the wood, the small things of the valley,
Too hungry to watch, praying, breathing, forgetting and forgiving.
The honey waters of heaven collect cool and sing a river’s song.
They carry the names of hills down to the sea
And the blessings of breezes back again.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Abergwesyn, art, fading, Highlands, Irfon River, landscape, light, MidWales, nature, photography, Poetry, polarity, river, sunset, transference, water, Wolf's Leap on September 8, 2016| Leave a Comment »
SUN SET 1
Rock throat
slaked sung.
Water song
white til
mirror still.
River light licks
slick grey rock.
Cotton grass
nods spun
iron red pools
Raven crags,
stern chapels,
catch last light,
song sent
down cools
river throat,
Spin then
whorled, a thread
white song.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, consciousness, continuance, dreaming, impermanence, landscape, manifestation, meaning, morning, mortality, nature, painting, Poetry, reality, represention, storytelling, Wales on March 13, 2016| 2 Comments »
ARTEFACT
We come and go one by one,
or in twos and threes,
waking, sleeping from dream to dream,
handfuls of dust cast heavenwards, taking shape,
then falling back to settled earth. Bubbles, thoughts, whispers.
Birdsong in a pearl-still dawn.
All day in this small green field,
in its tangled bare hedges,
in its edge of trees,
in its deep grasses, the birds
flit and feed, pause and fly off.
All day the sunlight picks out the distant slopes,
the forests, the valleys.
And they, too, come and go with mists
and clouds
and drifts of rain.
For months now I have been working the canvases,
(for people do so like a view to hold on to,
one so dear to them, one they do not have,
a way through the mute walls,
to remember an opening out, a beyond,
a distant something).
Against its nature to drip, against its habit to mix and merge,
against my own fingers’ wish to sweep and gesture.
A discipline,
the tying down of an illusion,
confection for tongue and eye.
A sweet minded moment, an ache of forgetting.
The life of itself, a liquid thing,
to be constrained so, to process
as a stately, well-dressed thing.
Not just a swirled, delightful, mute moment.
A meaning. A purpose identified. The monitoring of the familiar.
As if. As if.
As if there were a story.
As if there were a careful, structured tale.
A small beginning, a once, a long-ago.
Through wild, thorned paths and fog and frost
to a final end so careful balanced.
A just so.
An as it is.
Something to leave behind.
Something to say.
More than a rise and fall.
More than a raven’s cry across the valley.
More than a blackbird in the cool dawn air.
More than a drift of mist above a hidden river.
More than a rise of trout as the gnats dance on light.
The fire is lit
and it must be fed ’til nightfall.
Then, untended, it will die down,
become silent.
That smooth black,
silk-dark soot:
a hand-print,
a fingerprint on a cave wall:
we are here,
dreaming.
And we found a way through.
—-
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birds, corvus species, crows, Haiku, Haiku-ish, kites, landscape, late winter, nature, Poetry, Wales on March 9, 2016| 9 Comments »
Early morning frost
Wind beneath the raven’s wings
A nice cup of tea.
—
The first drops of rain
Three kites skim the valley floor
Their cries long and thin.
—
In the tall oak
by the chapel door
A gang of jackdaws
telling smutty jokes.
They have no care
for the slow sermons
of crows,
Nor the ponderous theology
of glint-eyed
ravens.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged landscape, March, nature, Poetry, spring, Wales on March 7, 2016| 4 Comments »
Sunshine on the snowfields.
Rain in the valleys.
The fields are churned,
The lambs cold.
From chimneys
Woodsmoke leans southwards.
But in the hedgerows
Sparrows are chattering.
On every bank
Daffodils risk their yellow song,
And the jackdaws dance
Carefree in wild, grey skies.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, consciousness, lanscape photography, nature, Poetry, space, time, Wales on February 27, 2016| 2 Comments »
The rivers rise and fall
with the rains.
The hills come and go
folded into their colours.
Day and night are
the forest’s murmured breath.
Green are the roads full of song,
the spine of sky split open,
And the drovers’ cries,
forever herding stars.
Fountains of light sucked
into velvet: the silent midnight.
These moments, so translucent,
flower quietly in the heart.
Nothing concealed nor measured,
no meaning here:
A wordless thing,
open.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Autumn, colour, fall, landscape photography, Llangammarch, nature, Poetry, seasons, Wales on October 28, 2015| 2 Comments »
Llangammarch lies golden,
Autumn tumbled.
Moss grown green
On slated roof.
Slate skies
Silent with holding light.
Patted butter,
The maple leaves.
Bronzed, the curled oak,
Birch, a spattered copper.
The lank drip, the bloodied cherry.
Through its towers,
The river runs,
Light and cold.
A long distance opens up
Through wood and hedgerow.
We are laid, once more,
Naked and glorious
To the hills.
An easy folding land,
Smoke-blue
And tinged with
Sweet and bitter.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, black and white, drawing, landscape, mind, multitudes, nature, night, plenitude, Poetry, presence, printmaking, stars, thoughts, world on October 7, 2015| Leave a Comment »
And is it not true,
Waiting a while in darkness
There blooms a sky
Once blank
Now full more and
More of stars?
And so, too,
in silence waiting
We see thoughts roar and multiply,
Emotions self-arise, endlessly,
and, fecund, roll
To oblivion.
It happens without effort,
This stretching, purring cat close by,
These hillsides echoing
With wild cries of foxes.
This air, motionless, cool,
A taste wrapped in grass and woodsmoke.
Without edge,
Without distinction,
Mind fills up all space.
The world, a cup
Half empty of sorrow,
Is half full of joy.
Yet we thirst
And must drink
Regardless.
Gulping life,
A taste to keep us,
A withstanding
of emptiness.
—
simonhlilly 