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Posts Tagged ‘photography’

Now Then

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 16, 2018| Leave a Comment »

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NOW THEN

Now then
This memory
Bright and ruthless
Still here.

One moment sparkles
One moment shatters
And the one who goes before it
And the one leaving after it
Are one but not the same.

A language of licked lips and discrepency
A bartering of meanings.
They bring here with pride
The skill of conjurors and pickpockets.

The language of rivers:
The song of things
Worn smooth by sound.

The heart of starlight
Is loneliness and beauty.
The silence of the deep.

Out of the eternal past
A poet’s voice
Leads the dead,
Revivifies the earth.

Words fall golden,
Free of meaning
Time rusts,
Becoming earth.

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The Words We Collect

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on January 26, 2018| 3 Comments »

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THE WORDS WE COLLECT

It is the whispers in the walls,
The ghosts that breath upon our lips.
We dissolve, lost in sounds from elsewhere,
From rooms, from halls.
Left, empty enough, losing attention,
We step out of ourselves
And for a moment become monstrous,
Glorious shadows in the winds
Of strange, bright mornings.

Though none of it speaks for us:
The silent, swirling mists, nor
The resounding, thundrous deep,
Nor the wells without light,
Nor the stars without memory,
Nor the movement of seconds,
Nor anything of the vastness.
For all these are constrained
By our sound, and uttered unbeknownst
By those guilty of innocence.

Left dancing on air, breathless,
Pierced, spun to a fine point, examined,
Cast out, then disregarded.
Swimming in an ocean of shadows
It is hard to know what is of value.

I shall put my ear to the door of the earth,
And listen to the ones never dead,
A music not of our blood though equally holy.
Even its echoes dissolve flesh and name
In the round chambers, skull-domed,
Grass-topped and nibbled by sheep.

For the extraordinary rests upon the ordinary,
As sound rests upon its own silence,
The known is upon the unknown
As birds rest upon tall oaks in evening.

We live above the noise, dipped in cloud.
Hearing rumours of the dreams of others,
And building what we can out of that.
Once given a name, believing that makes us real,
Practicing a story sewn from fables.

—

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It is the rocks

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 24, 2018| 1 Comment »

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It is the rocks that make the river sing,
The world that gives us song.
Bones creak, branches heavy with snow,
Breath captured must release.
Spring will come.

—

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All That Glory

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 20, 2018| Leave a Comment »

ALL THAT GLORY

All that glory, bred from blood and rot.
Ground bones to feed the noble good.
The Myrddin in us turns away.
Our Taliesin mocks the solicitous bards.
The histories of truth shall never be written.
The honest shall be driven mad
And disappear, unknown, unnamed,
Fuel for the mysteries of the deeps within.
This is the fabled cloth that suffocates us,
Memories rich, embroidered, gold-threaded,
Dreaming of heroes and just cause.

There was one who refused to give reasons,
And won by losing everything.
Who refused to be wise, refused to be violent
Who turned the wheel of matter
To become the spiral of eternity.
A simple seed buried and buried again.
Though cut each time it arises, given names and deeds,
Smothered again, tutored and redacted.

The first, the oldest gods, were not heroes.
They were farmers and dreamers, dexterous handed.
They were mothers and weavers, nursemaids, cooks.
Manawydan, king of Britain, best of cobblers.
He knew the loud ones take the power, write the stories.
He knew the land would grow empty, as always,
Drained by strife and pride, good and bad all cut down.
He kept his eye on the corners of things, on the smallest,
On the fine tendrils of futures, on the goodness
Of quiet satisfactions. There is no precedence
As we drift towards the doors of death.
Only goodness or bitterness will remain.
And the smallest of things, the smallest that sustain the rest,
Will do what they must, unwatched, unnamed, unknown
Woven through ephemeral eternities,
The inevitable victory of the insignificant.

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Trilithon

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 1, 2018| Leave a Comment »

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TRILITHON
(Three great stones upturned, strange, wriggling things beneath them)

Bright Browed

The truth is a severed head
telling tales to the mesmerised
survivors of a world disappearing.
As simple as it is, it cannot be circumscribed
by any answer.
The bright sun rises on a land, still with frost.
Over the horizon night falls and the
white winged soul of owls hunt glimmering,
and the children whimper in their swaddled sleep,
the dogs by the fireside and the dancing shadows.
Dawn is a spark that burns what went before.
The river is a crooked woman dancing on shivering hips.
We become bright-browed and ancient,
shunned and out of step, the harmony misunderstood.

Ssh! Pass it on!

The wise, as ever, steal their wisdom from the lips of others.
Too smart, they exult in escape from the banal.
Too fast, they run from the slow lurch of time.
Too full, they shrink and burst leaving nothing to itself.
The mouth is a cauldron cooking the unsayable,
bringing to life the exposed silent ones,
the cloaked, watching, single-eyed ones.
It does not say and need not say:
the seed we have become will die for the tree to live.
For the tree to live the seed is forgotten.
Turn around, this is not yours ( nor ever was).
Perfect, you must dissolve into one thought.
the one never before, the one pillar that upholds the sky,
the silver-headed beast, the clutch and shudder of love,
and know its name, and know when it was born, and for what purpose.
And never, ever, ever, say.

Cauldron

The bard’s mouth is a cauldron that cooks the food of heroes,
That will not suffer the fame of fools.
It will bring the dead to life, though they can never speak for themselves.
It will feed all, no matter how great the host.
It will wriggle endlessly through time
But will never escape the timeless, spiral woman who turns into herself.
It will come out of the sea. It is the way to within and without.
What is not yours , you will come to love,
If you are wise.
A war of words clothing naked souls.

—

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Taliesin Sutras (2)

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 31, 2017| Leave a Comment »

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TALIESIN SUTRAS 2

7
(Landscape)

Late Wanderings
Food from Annwfn, one grain before death.
Honour the pot, the boiling cauldron,
The simmering burden.
I shall digest the words
Served up hot and fast.
Caught, threaded, herded
Towards an inevitable end.
What is scattered?
The winnowed chaff.
Wind and water,
The soul, pale and sleeping,
A mysterious thing.

(Down into the boggy water,
Thrice slain in the holy way,
My burst body bleeding its
Mist-white soul along the causeway,
The teal, the mallard messenger.
I will not forget: straight into the sunset
With my tongue of prayer,
My skin of supplication.)

These images,
These words drawn in colour.
These maps, these directions.
Overlayed on what is not,
What is.

(Landscape is what I have become.
Tongue of soil, skin and nail, wrapped root,
Spread out as hill, my throat this river
Quenching all, my eye: horizon wide,
Drinking star patterns, eternal web.)

Bardic circuit
Of the tenuous ellyll.
They who become outside themselves,
Soul wanderer, wraiths, elves.

(Without our body, woad-cleansed warriors,
We live heartless in a different tune.
Though love still, in a vaster way.
Fuel for deeper worlds, the fabric stretched
And folded, shift, shroud, swaddling.
We, the mist between your breathing,
Your silences, your shoal thoughts.)

The real dream dreamed.
Do you know what you are
When you are asleep?

Taliesin asleep on the sea
Travelling through words
As if they were worlds.

What comes out of the ground
Is never what went into the ground.
The seed is
dead, the leaves are green and growing.

In house of earth, bound by blue iron
Self and not-Self shackled in a mound
All for dreaming.

Afagddu is soot (besmirched smith), the remains of wood and fire.
Ceridwen, the crook of the sky, thigh of the river, tree bowing down,
Crouching woman, cauldron hunched, the squatting one.

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The Blessing and Poison of Good Words

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on December 28, 2017| Leave a Comment »

—

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THE BLESSING AND POISON OF GOOD WORDS

no moon, but a single
sickle call of an owl
in the deep valley

cold stars are winter’s eyes
as warmth leaves the world
and darkness wraps all up
as close to silence
as one can think.

by rivers and stars are we lifted up.
by rivers and stars are we brought low.

silent voices dipped in cloud.

I shall sit in darkness and dissolve into light.

dissolve into endless light.
dissolve into light.

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A Cloak of Words

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 17, 2017| Leave a Comment »

A Cloak of Words
(The head of Bran whispering poet’s ears)

A whole long life he muttered dream charms
In the warm safe hall, in golden birdsong.
This life is a metaphor for living, but is not quite,
Is what he said, till curious, one looked beyond the doors.

The cold sea winds, the mist-white cry of gulls,
The memory stripped, fact bones, dream blubber,
Food for drowned thought, shivered clear,
Born again.

The snow creeps down to the valley floor.
A bullfinch in a flash of sunlight.

The Good Raven is cloaked beneath,
hidden and always in our blood.
And he will whisper, good-hearted,
as bright brows burst with illumined fire,
a convocation of the one, the only, bard in many voices.

A sea of hills, and one mighty one striding through.
It is a downward spiral from there, no good came of it,
Except a good tale dusting sunsets with fools’ gold.
Perhaps that is, after all, enough. As much as
Can be hoped for where women are unheard
And men so willing to go to war for pride.

So senseless is this suffering as to drive them raving, about the forests,
To perch muttering in bare branches, to shun the comfort,
To converse with blackbirds, to remember in aeons,
To weigh the heavy genealogies, to befriend stars.
Brave enough to see and to speak in true riddles;
To confound the self-righteous mind, to spit out the grit;
To fire the dark night with lightning, to sweeten bitterness.

And to go unheard, to go misunderstood, to go mocked,
As the world itself is, as the son of the world is,
To be turned into ghosts to frighten children with,
Unfashionable prophets, an annoyance of thorn woven crowns.

Bright-eyed, the blessed carrion-eaters return
Making the most of the already lost.
Wishing them well with a natural grace.
The beautiful bones pecked clean,
A lean, mysterious perfection
Is all that ever remains.

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Storm Morning

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 8, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Storm Morning

Into the slow heron lift of it.
The storm morning roar,
Like a city train, rattles roof and windows.

Druid trees with one eye shut
Stand on one leg and let go of nearly everything –
That is what their roots, deep as choirs, allow.

On green meadow and crashing hill
We push against a sting of rain.
Lost, but not lost as the ones by the sea,
Watching the waves eat the shore and the harbours drown
And all the long, safe years melted away
In a wall of water and sound.

It is a patient world, willing always to start again.
A reformulation of parameters, season by season.
What is gone is gone, the autumn trees say.
What is gone is gone, says the storm of grey morning.

—

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Names will burst through

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 3, 2017| 3 Comments »

NAMES WILL BURST THROUGH

How long will it be before the words form?
And the names, how long til they congregate?
How long until they accumulate weight enough
To press down and hold still and never ever be forgot again?
On lips, on paper, on stone, into the bark of trees.
These names are fragile, finite, unknowable as rivers are.
In their passing we believe we have known them.
A familiar dream. So familiar. So much of a summoning,
A stirring up, a fold and an ache in the hearts,
A fold and an ache in the valleys and on the hills.
The wind will blow them away and the rains shall erase them.
As a long day in sun, the language changes.
What is smooth grows harsh. What is bitter turns to poignance.
(The sobs of the dying, lost in mud- one more ridge, lads, one more.
We shall be remembered in stained glass,
On stained grass, on mud among the poppies of remembering
And poppies of forgetfulness, my love.)
They stretch out and pierce through the noise.
Given any chance they shall strain to matter.
Our dear dead ones and our forgotten ones.
Beneath the skin, beneath the soil, beneath the silence.
Their names echo around our lips as we sleep.
Under lids the eyeballs roll and flutter.
Is it for this, only for this, just for this,
And one more, one more kiss, lip to lip,
Breath to breath, sigh to sigh.
The river sweeping it all away.

—

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