Posted in Uncategorized, tagged landscape, light, Mid Wales, Poetry, quietness, Sunday morning, Wales on May 28, 2017| Leave a Comment »
A cuckoo’s voice
rides the undulations
of the day.
Hardly a breath of wind,
but it will come on to rain later.
Sunday morning sun pushing towards brightness,
fades through lazy layered atmospheres.
The roads are quiet.
In an hour or two
the tourists will arrive
to see what life is all about.
They will whisper by,
Pass through in clean cars
and return tonight
to their city sleep,
Dreams of emptiness
and birdsong.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, attention, clarity, continuance, deep mind, Gywn ap Nydd, inspiration, landscape, landscape photography, memory, mind, mist, phiotography, Poetry, the Wild Hunt, thought on May 15, 2017| 3 Comments »
CONJURATION
He sits by the window letting the landscape go.
A little incense will stretch and curl in the moving airs.
There is welcome rain on pale, misted hills:
The meadows and their trees will green.
The shoals will flicker beneath thin surfaces,
And there is skill in waiting and skill in catching up the glimmer.
Sometimes it is enough to hold one wriggling thing.
Sometimes a light touch will tease a line,
A bright twist into this world, a hopeful humming reel.
There is the holding and the letting go.
A whisper wish to Gwyn ap Nydd
Who hunts these lost ghosts and churns them upwards.
To mark a path only, or to push down into it,
Or to be pulled willynilly in mad rush and see,
See where it leads, traipsing forgetful, curious.
Or but to float above serene and light as hawk bones,
To not become distracted by maybes,
To contain all, to exclude nothing, to lose track of no slither,
To allow a subtle sedimentation – to be that patient,
To become equanimity, geological.
It will be the touch of madness that marks it out,
The touch of madness they shall not forget.
The discomfort of impossible resurrection:
Light that is not there, a bubbling up of echoed sounds,
A mystery of conjured voices, a song of ghosts.
This, the slow and certain engraving of our vanishing lives
Upon your smoothed and cooling brows; etched, hatched and nested within
Your twigged and tumbledown minds.
A thimble of the past to dull each ache of uncertain stitch.
That impossible race to reach each sunsetting horizon.
Between the moment and the madness
Is where the bright shoals swim.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged as it is, landscape, MidWales, Poetry, politics, spring, Wales on May 12, 2017| Leave a Comment »
How the cuckoos sing sweetly
Of treachery and loss.
In the dewy morning
The rivers run low,
The hills to themselves,
Quietly weeping.
Ravens are joking on their way
To the slaughter-fields.
They do not need
The permission of gods
To be satisfied and at peace.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Gwyn ap Nydd, haunted spaces, inspiration, language, may day, mayday, mond, myth, Poetry, reading, silence, song, the gathering of souls, the numinous, voices, Wales, words on May 5, 2017| 1 Comment »
SOMETHING TO BE SAID (MAYDAY)
Pauses grow longer, a melancholy may soon creep in.
We cannot escape our own voices.
( “We rarely go out these days and visitors, though longed for,
are a great discomfort”).
It is a wild guilt that wants our words in other’s heads.
Always a nuisance and a pleasure
to be infected with poetry,
to admit the familiar voices, to see which one leads, this time, the hunt.
Gwyn ap Nydd collecting souls, the ghosts of words,
The white words, the vapoured words,
the haunted words – as poetry is.
‘White, Son of Mist’ – like the morning,
the first attempt at May, after a night of rain,
new in stillness and birdsong, mist on green land,
the ash trees still thinking about their coming fountains of flowers,
roots wriggled so deep in the past, and aching old.
The dunnock’s sweet descent.
It filters down as if spider webs
And gold dust – the flecks
Of memory and forgetting.
A city with loud inhabitants, unkind and strange.
A darkness punctuated with doors and reasons.
As if it didn’t matter, everything collapses.
The moment passes, the tongue gives up.
It cannot make the chords that the brain sings in,
Just one note at a time, syllable by.
There is something to be said for silence.
The way the mist in its own dreaming gravity
Slides along the slopes
And settles in the cwms.
The way it shifts space.
The way it delineates what is not itself.
With what would we fill these silences
Should all the voices stop?
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birds, Buddhism, cosmic balance, Haiku-ish, invocation, landscape, Poetry, praise, protectors, ritual, shinto, Sound, Tao, Wales, Wang Wei on April 29, 2017| 7 Comments »
THE SENDING AWAY OF NEGATIVE ENERGIES
One, two, three.
The thrush in the ash:
Vast mantra of space,
His bell voice and dorje bill.
Phurba crow
Struts alert amongst the dreaming sheep.
He stabs the ground
With a pure vision.
Silence as the clouds build to rain.
Taiko in the hills.
Lorry dungchens drone
On the valley road.
My ears are pierced with golden words.
Golden dust is in my eyes.
Golden smoke arises from horizon altar.
The Will of Heaven, unfathomable
As ever.
Some say there are stories to tell,
Some say stories to disprove.
In every hedge a blackbird rattles alarm,
Though there is nothing to fear.
Who has the shell as blue as sky?
The robin, I think.
Its white eternal arc
Is the world turned inside out.
Lying unnoticed, fallen from the chapel hawthorn.
A ruse to escape death.
Like shinto priests
The magpies strut with care the chapel roof.
They enunciate name and place
And the desires of each supplicant.
Hop and bow, hop and bow,
And call aloud to the spirits
Who will listen.
Whilst the domed mountain
Rests in Wang-Wei
And Wang-Wei rests in the mountain.
The ghosts of words stretched thin,
Their lips unsure whether to cry or smile,
But that is the nature of prayer and praise.
The whines of the psalmist irritating the gods
To distraction.
Give a little thought to the little things,
The wriggling life stepped upon unseen.
The unconcerned hosts, the vast inconsequential
Upon whom you rest.
The threads wear thin,
The seed unhurried.
A syllable breath forms
In the river’s mouth.
Never quite uttered.
Never quite understood.
We have not enough silence,
Not enough pause to continue here long.
From the dimpled, starry horizons
The Protectors gather.
What shall they deem worthy,
And what destroyed?
It is not a trick question.
But there is no answer.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, cuckoo, deceit, elections, landscspe, Poetry, poison, politics, spring on April 27, 2017| 2 Comments »
ELECTION
Cloud is low, a light rain.
The rivers will rise, and the cuckoo’s voice.
These is no road to happiness.
Sit still a while. It is here.
In cities sprout the sudden
Intricacies of deceit:
New plans of action;
Words dressed, eloborate dances.
Fear cultivated as if it were virtue.
Hypnotic screens drip poison:
Connla’s Well on every tongue.
We rear the monsters of others.
The monsters of our own,
We have not recognised.
Shucked out and flailing,
Naked goodness pecked by crows,
Growing cold as the summer
Warms the wooded hills.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, lament, landscape, Poetry, rural depopulation, Wales on April 20, 2017| 2 Comments »
And they are still here
Still beneath the land
Protesting the desolations
As ravens do on heather banks.
And they are still here
Too proud to move or sway
Driven down, weathered and grey
As their own gateposts, slowly
Laminating, word on word,
One purpose losing its one memory.
And they are still here
Though always leaving.
The language of rivers
Muttered on slated lips.
Eyes closed,
Dreaming on hilltops.
They are still here
Initials carved on tumbled stones.
The neat hearth scattered,
Black earth, cold fire,
Comfort lost.
They are still here on
The cool breezed morning,
In dew bright hollows,
On silent roads
Sunlit, full of hope.
Marginalia
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, art, comments, Dinas, fragments, human endeavour, landscape photography, May morning, Mid Wales, mind, openness, Poetry, spring, striving on May 24, 2017| 1 Comment »
MARGINALIA
below this turbulence:
slow, vast, are the currents.
Knotted threads soften, unwind
(As morning mists
In curling, upward sun).
The ghosts we hold most dear,
Those haunted voices we always hear,
That diffuse the endless night-
They come and go
As if they owned the place,
As if they mattered more.
They are so tiring,
These endless stumblings
Proudly towards truth,
Where simple goodness would suffice.
The broken-nailed, mad eyed dreamers,
The demon-fed preachers.
For we tumble towards a close,
And that is always and only certain.
Here, is the benign patience of Spring
Come again to remind us
That warmth will split the hawthorn blossom
(And the hills already drunk and hazy on it).
Just one sunny day,
and all we dream of
is summer.
A slow dance of swallows,
lambs and birdsong,
One blue warm billowy morning in May,
enough to banish all the long months
Of winter, to open and relax,
To build a nest
As if it were forever.
—
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