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 art, Dinbych yr Pysgod, landscape, photography, Poetry, seaside, sun, Tenby, tides, Wales, weekend break on May 21, 2019| 1 Comment »
—
Two nights by the sea
Matching our breathing to the slow waves.
Hardly a cloud to darken the waters
From this smiling turquoise.
A half moon nudges the tides
Wearing footsteps away, the miles of sand.
Thoughts drift to the one horizon,
But do not ever wander far.
We meander around the old town walls
And back and forth,
Like painters touching a near complete canvas,
Almost perfectly satisfied.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged geography, Irfon Valley, landscape, Mynydd Epynt, photography, Poetry, Wales on November 26, 2018| Leave a Comment »
OUR GEOGRAPHY – CWM DWFNANT
It falls from other airs, some other whispers, other, other cries:
The echoed uplands out of sight that push the clouds
Where the ravens reach.
It wriggles itself fast into its folds,
carved back, a groove deep and dark,
slanted in forest and tumbled stone.
The road spins around it, a snake’s hiss,
slick and narrow, and the racing waters beneath it.
Its name is Stream from the Abyss, from the Deep,
from the Resounding Deep.
And it is loved by cloud so
And loved by mist so.
They cling to and nourish themselves there.
They are born there and are raised there.
Mysterious as poetry, its waters race down
From their hidden places, bright and ice cold,
stirred by shadows from worlds above and worlds below.
Cwm Dwfnant, a mouth that utters,
An eye that gazes heavy-lidded,
vision crowded,
Dream-wrapped.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Ancient Welsh yews, art, attributes, Cambrian Mointains, contemplation, deity, meditation, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Otherword, photography, Poetry, power, sacred yew, the numinous, the yew tree, trees, Wales, yidam on August 12, 2018| 1 Comment »
YIDAM YEW
As though through the bark
The tree remembers
every storm
Every wild sunset.
every dream of fleeting light captured, savoured.
Every rip tide and cloud race, every
Second’s shade and bright reveal.
A mad visionary truth,
The taste of an ultimate, near ultimate, real,
Stretching and scattering certainty of form and view.
—
At its heart is a red darkness,
a blue darkness,
a glow of orange sunrise and sunsets,
a weight of waiting
and a weight of watching.
–
It will see you looking at it
through your own eyes.
It will measure the coming and going of your breath,
and know that it is dreaming.
–
Those who name it,
do not know its name,
which began at the beginning of things
And will continue beyond their ending,
and then will not be completed, even then.
–
Though there is a snake hiss silence,
though the spine fills and hollows with dust,
though one moment shatters in black light,
though there is a taste of pollen and old books,
though there is a stutter thought,
though there is a window or a mirror.
–
A perfect dance of stillness,
a perfect song of silence,
a filled void that drowns and opens out.
A cease and a spinning.
Location lost.
A reorientation in a million shards of shadow shimmer.
Wordless is the wisdom of compassionate beasts.
–
Whetever form it takes,
it is light and time and endless mind
Stretched out in sunlight, flowing as wind and rain,
A map of constancy, road to all things.
–
‘Yidam’ is the Tibetan word for ‘meditational deity’. It has energetic presence that encourages awakening and is dressed in a form and metaphor that excites attention. Like all deities/spirits/thought forms, it is paradoxically illusory and of an independant existence more real than the individual personality could ever be. ‘Wrathful’ deities have the appearance of dynamic, fear-provoking, fiery forms that destroy illusion and false concepts.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dhrupad, landscape, music, nature, nature photography, photography, Poetry, roses, summer solstice, Wales on June 21, 2018| Leave a Comment »
DHRUPAD 9 (solstice roses)
Solstice roses solstice rain
bright as sparrows
solstice cloud low bright
and sparkling rain.
Field roses, wild roses, dog roses,
solstice roses bloom fall fail
arching sun-like arching star-like
arching dancing leaping hedgerows.
Field roses white as cotton dresses
in sunlight fields in sunlight wind in solstice fields
light as cotton white as summer
blooming falling failing blooming.
And dog roses pink and frail and strong
as sacred as secret pink flesh
blushing pink curling pink scented and smiled and honey sweet
and stroked in light and solstice solstice light,
bloom and leap and arch and fall and fail.
Tattered heavy petal fall
weighed and washed bright solstice rain.
White as sheep new shorn, white as blisters,
white as taste in morning air,
white as solstice fall and failing falling failing,
flocking leaping solstice roses arching out
and arching over and petal falling petal failing pale as butter,
bright as eyelids, bitter smiling falling
failing blooming failing falling
solstice roses wild roses dog roses field roses,
thorned and throned and holding on,
leaping arching bowing blessing
bowers sprinkled white and pink
glorious as sheep in the morning solstice,
morning sparrow hedgerow morning,
rain wet wind and sparkling solstice morning.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged alap, dhrupad, music, night, photography, Poetry on May 9, 2018| 4 Comments »
DHRUPAD 2 (night)
Slow now, night now, moon now, night now. The eye shadowed, land shadowed, mind shadowed, night now, owls now, in mind shadows and moon mind too. Cloud shadowed and fine mist light drifting wood ways, the river sky, the river wood, the river mind, the moon a drop. A drop down, suspended, held drift the night words outwards, upwards, slow now upwards, star and drift and dark shadow and cloud upwards along the light line the shadow mind cool cool in moon and deep drowned one mind slain and and and no more lost no more moon no more slope to sing the river forest sky rain cloud ways slow now, slow the moon now, the deep now the silent now the shadows. Now.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, chain of beings, creation, food, hymns, music, photography, Poetry, praise, purpose, silence, sustenance, tradition on March 24, 2018| 5 Comments »
SING OUT
Singing hymns to emptiness
Sound disappears with meaning
The instant it leaves the mouth
We need gods to sing to,
Something of the familiar,
But made more important,
As if worms and weeds
Had not silently shaped
All we are and will be.
It is what rivers and stars do,
It is what sheep and birds do,
Sing out to each other
That thin, frail line between
Life and death and life again.
Greedy gods and good gods
One by one supplanted
Though their lives are aeons.
Fed by song, happy in their given shapes
Until the singing stops
Where they forget their names,
Hatch as butterflies hungry for nectar.
There are the great and there are the small
While the song is sound and silence.
The void: a pause between movements
Where the audience wonders if it should clap
But remains in stillness, held within
A lovely diminishing resonance.
—
