Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bluebells., evening, landscape, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Poetry, spring, Wales on May 16, 2018| 1 Comment »
SAPPHIRE
Evening hills
cracked sapphire.
Gods made them so
in the peace of sure weightlessness.
A north wind, though,
that clears the sky
and will make these shorter nights
moon bright and bitter,
will hold the bowing bluebells
in bud a day or two yet.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bright day, cuckoos, dhrupad, fresh weather, landscape, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Poetry, skyscape, spring, swallows, Wales on May 14, 2018| Leave a Comment »
DHRUPAD 4 (windy day)
Green rain, green air,
wind cool with doves,
cooing with doves and,
it could be, cuckoos,
it could, it could be cuckoos
between the mother calling
and the lamb’s reply.
A slide down to the sea
is the river task,
the river fast brown rain full
spinning away downstream
daffodils fading, cherry blossom confetti,
bless you, bless you,
and the blackthorn a rimed white now,
a pure white now,
a white that clears and seals the eye, now.
And the surprising green of elm seeds
hanging high and leaning down the road,
wood elm, secret elm, mountain elm.
And a new day ripped with blue,
healed with rain and healed again.
The light and soft
racing the dips and darkened woodlands.
And in the valley it could be a cuckoo,
it could.
And the dip and rise
and screech of swallows’ circumference,
their wheel and compass
the round wind and blue sunlight
and a deeper height to it all now,
a dancing deeper height to it.
Open blue winds,
the opening, the year, the seed.
The brighting day
in this flurrying
wind rush.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, birdsong, blackbird, cân yr adar, flow, landscape ohotography, landscspe, music dhrupad, nature, Poetry on May 11, 2018| 1 Comment »
DHRUPAD 3 (blackbird song)
Blackbird rain, blackbird river,the rich so rich evening cool air, evening rich scent air, blackbird still river standing cool. Pines whisper the breeze the breeze the slide knife heart song thrills, mellow knife heart knife song. Rounded world voice river now ripple now voice. Apple rounded, juice voice, drip drip drip voice, echoed stone voice, remembering voice, saying floating cool rain voice. Golden smooth and jet black shiny voice. Rain split, rainbowed wrapped twist thread, weaving woven gold and gilded through and through, this warm this cool this water clear air song voice moment. Stopped and started time held and space thrilled, sun and moon and stars all, all named together, one river named, one moment twirled named, this river sorrow joy river, this eye opening out, vast vast this throb, this little throat, this heart, heart full, rain washed, cool washed, all washed, voice river, named.
—
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 alap, art, atmosphere, dhrupad, landscape, landscape photography, music, Poetry, repetition on May 6, 2018| Leave a Comment »
DHRUPAD 1 (mountain air)
slow now, slow the grey cool,
slow
the
way
down.
The gods love this – space free of souls,
no
weight
of prayer.
Small thought light as wings, light on light,
shimmer stacking cloud.
The journey is one breath belonging to horizons
all ours.
They hover here,
hover here,
endless attractors
the cascading distant waters,
the air breezed
from
high
ice
centuries abiding in white.
Slow now, the in and out
suffering little from its movement,
revolving an axis honeyed.
If there are words, they become smudged distance. If there is
sound,
it drifts cloud and misty vapour,
sand, grained and free,
slipping
sift
away,
slow, now, slow.
—
I have been listening to a lot of Classical Indian music lately, especially rudra veena and surbahar that are instruments ideal to interpret the ancient style of dhrupad. Dhrupad is a vocal devotional music that slowly and thoroughly uncovers the notes and patterns of each piece. There is a lot of repetition and sequences, and although words are sung, it is the emotion within the notes of the raga that creates its profound effect. These poems take some of the rotational effects of dhrupad and its exploration of motifs and rhythm. Originally written as a continuous text, they will best be presented in an open arrangement so that the eye intuits the timing of its narration/reading by the various groupings of words and phrases. (I do not think I will be able to accomplish it very well here within this page structure, but hopefully there will be some of the flavour I intended). There may be something of e. e. cummings, and something of Harold Budd, something of the word patterns of George Macbeth and something of the helter-skelter pace of Dylan Thomas. But most of all, I hope, the slow savouring of sound and image suggested by the alap and jhor of dhrupad.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, landscape, landscspe photography, living, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Poetry, spring, time, Wales on April 30, 2018| Leave a Comment »
ONLY THE DEAD
Only the dead
Can thrive in heaven.
Let us unravel here
In words and feelings:
This hollow as heavy as lead,
A weight of mists,
A weight of starlight fluttering.
A winding road after rain,
Leading uphill into cloud.
If we can
And if we choose
We shall balance it all with bliss;
Sound that goes beyond hearing,
Beyond the bones of meaning
And the bones of winter.
Sunlight warming closed eyes,
A drift of sheep and birdsong.
The sky is cloudless, silent.
But it will come on to rain later.
Day stretches across fields and hills.
Savour time,
For one day
Time will be no more.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bird calls, cloud lightl, ecology, Haiku-ish, haku, landscape photography, morning, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, Poetry, rain, spring, Wales on April 25, 2018| Leave a Comment »
—
GYLFINIR
(The Curlew)
cool morning.
clouds rise.
the curlew calls.
sunlit
is the new horizon.
—
damp grasses –
fresh green.
sheep in the fields
curlew on the hill.
—
inner light.
sun slips through
before the rain.
a distant curlew calls.
—
melancholy joy.
a pause in the rain.
the curlew’s descending call.
—
perhaps we shall
be forgiven
perhaps, forgotten:
cuckoo and
curlew
in the empty wood,
the flowering field.
sunlight and
shade
on the distant
mountain.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged "Light Arising", art, awen, bardic training, cauldron of Ceridwen, consciousness, eclipse, gwion bach, knowledge, language, Poetry, Taliesin, Welsh myths, woodblock print on April 23, 2018| 4 Comments »
GWION WATCHING
There you must stay
(Placed there for some reason)
Sitting next to impenetrable darkness
To stir what no-one else can.
Hunched as the moon
While the crooked woman sleeps.
It is not yours, this world you must watch bubbling,
It has another purpose of its own in time:
Inchoate gestation, full of all potential,
Unlimitless sound, a well of pealing light,
Webbed dawns, bird song full.
As the cormorant hangs still upon its cross of sunlight,
As the lovely whiteness bends
To a bowed and then starless dark,
As the coagulation proceeds you can do nothing but watch,
A small, waking thing on the edge of pearl-lipped perfection.
The wise know the dance ( and always have done):
The dark and light across the skies,
The mother gravid with light child, hungry darkness following,
Born for her, hungry for her and her for him,
The metre of time, a dance of shadow,
A pattern woven to weave its reflection on the ground we stand,
Limned by stones and pool, the notched stick, the knotted thread.
We must stay ( placed here for some reason)
Watching the starlight bubble,
Watching the season’s seethe and its cauldron sky heat
Steamed with cloud and drift of poetry,
The song the same, ever unsung in its entirety,
Lost in its own passionate cataracts, its tributaries, its silver streams.
And here now, when you least expect it,
Drowsy and all else in mind sleeping,
Eloquence will leap out and take you.
Words will alight from burning void,
Words not yours, becoming yours.
You will race laughing, screaming through all worlds
And finding no rest, you shall squirm a heartbeat from death,
Chasing and chased by darkness
And in the end fall golden, nothing but grain,
To ripen in night’s breast and belly.
Born nameless again, gestated on oceans,
Drowned across time towards subtle lands
Neither shore nor sea but the roar of river’s mouth,
A beam of sunlit dawn dazzling,
A perfect song, (having forgotten and remembered everything,
Lost and found everything).
Darkness curled and potent on your lip.
Light, a perfect spear upon your tongue.
Slippery as eels is language
Fed by the weeds of the world beneath:
Dark and light and all things,
And nothing, will be your song,
Everlasting echo, three drops
In a dewdrop
Moment.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Afagddu, alchemy, art, awen, bardic metaphysics, being, blessed monsters, compost, dark star, dark sun, deep ecology, deep mind, drift, eclipse, nigredo, pieta, Poetry, prima mater, rahu and ketu, still life photography, substrate, Taliesin, tectonic calligraphy, the cauldron, the hungry dark, Welsh language, what matters Welsh poetry, yew tree macropsia on April 22, 2018| 3 Comments »
AFAGDDU
Am nyt
Vo nyt vyd;
Nyt vyd am nyt vo;
Since it may not be
It shall not be;
It shall not be
Since it may not be;
To the light, bright, guileful one
This darkness unfathomable
Is a fear ugly and unbreached.
Refusing its nomenclature
Sullen beyond edges, unruled.
If it has language it is the language of mould
The skittering of small things, of decay.
A mulch, a compost, a howl of vowels
A gutteral bubbling of green mud,
White, stripped bones grinning
Through swags of drooping flesh.
It is the architecture of night,
The logic of humus, its own gravity,
Penetration of life within life,
Life searching out new form,
Stretching for new freedoms,
A rainbow slick, gyrating in fractal.
Subhuman, unruly son of the mother
Held in her arms, limp and ever dying,
Pieta, beneath matter’s crucifixion,
The rot of resurrection, a weaving of thorns,
Refusing the excuses of others, nothing to tell,
Washed in tears, its own aromatic unguent.
A secret not what it seems, that few will approach,
Is the centre of all things.
Vyg kadeir
A’m peir
A’m deduon.
My song
And my cauldron
And my rules.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged growing, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, Poetry, spring, sunshine, Wales on April 21, 2018| Leave a Comment »
A WIDE SUN
Slow cloud
draws the hills.
A drift of warm air takes
the last of the snows.
In deeper valleys green is
no longer an imagining,
And a wide sun
pushes out the days
Into weightless blue evenings.
It is something, now, to float upon,
To hope upon, to gather up and savour.
The fingertips of Spring
parting the valley song
And the woods, a veil of birds,
And a new green day.
—
—
