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Posts Tagged ‘Poetry’

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MUSIC FOR THE END

I shall not go into tomorrow
( though I may dream there).

These poems poised to begin again.
Our music, the only thing to give us birth.
What the endless aeons of starlight have waited for.

At this river’s edge – the taste of tears and flowers.
I shall dream tonight the distance –
Roaring waterfalls in Yolmo,
And the pearl liquid silent waters:
Loch Craignish after rain.

Do what we may, it will never be enough.
We paint the day and start again.
The gods have cursed us with their beautiful weaknesses.
With poetry that will not stay,
With friends and with loves
And with endings.

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LAMENT

The ones who cared for these graves
Are in their own now, or gone
To the churning, restless cities,
Sick of rain and creeping moss
And the lament of the kite
And lamb and buzzard.
Empty on the hillsides,
No small fires, even,
Amongst the tumbled walls
And broken doorways.
In its own green centuries the ivy creeps
And swells to cover all disgrace
And tragedy.
It clings well like nothing else can,
On the flat, grey slabs of day
And the gouged, dark ruts of night.

The ones here now – what stupid clumsy tongues
That cannot speak, cannot mould the sounds
To poetry if they tried, if ever they would.
Escaping their own shipwrecked lives
And cast up breathless and lost in beauty.
Who would think such inundation
So complete, so far from any shore.
These seething, roaring tides,
This wrack and seagull tattered debris.

In the hills small pools unexpectedly
Catch and hold blue patched skies.
The streams fist their names down into rock,
Enunciate the mad gush of seasons,
Lost and found and wrapped within
The dark and shining horizon.
If it can be nowhere else, then rest here.
Dust thou art, and the only food
For any futures there may still be.
The cold wind wraps itself around
And will not let go.
Soon will come the rain.

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1
Go down, come down
Through the hollow heart,
The yew of Llanfechan
Peeled away, the long
Sunlight moment
Mesmeric, the voice
Of voices whispered
On green tongues, long
And longing, and full
Of tragedy.

Enclosed, but
Wearing thin,
Boundary still between
Worlds, the boundary
Between times,
Given up to earth,
Food for the
Little things.

That is what the mighty
Always are.
The upright fading away.

Let me bow down,
Bow down to earth
And mulch,
Forgotten in lost
Corners, lost
On a tangent,
The slant of
Trajectories
Towards
The same
Centre.

2
This heart,
A bowl of dust.
These hollowed hills
Scooped out, abraded
By flocked moments,
Voracious, universal.
This pulse, this canopy, this swan,
Arced and spread-winged,
Reflected, shattering rainbows,
A quiver-full of light
And a mumble of story.
We no longer swing the verses,
Though the chorus is our breath itself,
Self-generated, a blueprint, a prayer.

Curtained in cloud and light, the valley floor,
Unfamiliar at this height, all becomes
Mysterious and fading.

The old tree, clasped in itself
Knotted with hymns it knew
Before brick and stone.
Its own Last Trump, its own
Resurrection, the woman in the sun,
Seven bowls and seven seals,
A thundering voice ‘How much longer
Shall we suffer in hunger? How much
Longer shall we suffer in thirst?’

To change shape and, invisible,
To infiltrate the insignificant.
A sermon on patience
And darkness.

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RED KITE

She has bones of air,
Feathers of air.
Floating, she becomes air.
Horizon eyes of vast
And particular scope.
Unclouded the focus,
Bright with hunger-fire,
Bright with soul-fire.
Floating unworldweary,
Weightless, a jewelled heartbeat
Adjusting to each breath
And sigh,
the green valley air.

—

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Transient 7

TRANSIENT 7

Were it to remember itself
In a million years
It would dream these
Mists and valleys
Wondering were they real.
And like a song sung in sleep
The birdsong drifting from
Each white hollow
And the rippled hilltops
Coming and going
And the hills and fields
Lying so green and glorious
And the slow rain
The slow rain.

—

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PAKAD: CLOUDLESS SILENCE

It is a cloudless silence, a stretched skin of light,
White wheel of sun and moon, stars silver singing road,
Painted vast and edgeless, the deep rolling earth
Breathing in hills, dreaming in valleys.

Cloudless silence here
White light pierces winter mind.
The tumbling waters

Cloudless silence here
Lost in mist, crow calls its mate.
Cold air, dogs barking.

Cold breeze shifts the mist
Dogs bark in the distant town.
A cloudless silence

In cloudless silence
All these thoughts fall silent now.
Footsteps on the road.

A delicate touch
Keeping warm this egg of words.
New cloudless silence.

Three crows dancing song
Cold breeze on the snowcapped hill.
A cloudless silence.

Pakad, jor, alap.
A slow unfolding morning.
This cloudless silence.

—

A pakad is a theme in Classical Indian music. It is a short series of notes that identifies and characterises every raag. It appears and reappears throughout each piece of music. It is a constant moment of return to mood and purpose.
Alap is the slow development and investigation of the note sequences of a raag, a discovery of themes.
Jor is the section that continues the development within a more rhythmical framework.
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TRANSIENT 5

A day of slow skies
Testing new brightnesses.

Cwm Dwfnant is lost
In dreams of cloud once more.

In the green centre
The river whispers

And the crows feel that
Spring is near now, over the hills,

And sunlight, too,
In the slate and stately rise and exhale.

A sleeping world,
Dreaming of waking,

Dreaming of a small unfolding.

—

TRANSIENT 6

Tinder, the horizon.
Laid just so
With blue on blue
To catch spark and roar
Come sunrise.

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Transient (4)

Skies of palest violet,
An uninhabited eye
Whose souls are words.

An unimaginable wind
Blows light in waves
across the hills.

Like heaven,
the snowfields rise above,
Hardly visible, their glimmering.

A village of daffodils sways.
The jackdaws freefall in joy.
There is ice in the buckets
And all the farms roar with fires
For the lads and lasses hunched
With cold hands
From a long night’s lambing.

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TRANSIENT 3

The light that paces
The valley floor

Graces hearts with
Its bright and stately shade,

Reminds the soul
It ever ends and begins again,

That nothing, not one breath,
Remains more

Than one
Scintillating motion.

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The words
of the sea
Roaring drunk
And glorious
in endless sunlight.
He has squeezed through
regardless,
Touching the soon
And the many.
He knows that
Poetry is
not the words.
Words
are what remains
When poetry has flown.
Flown like a bomb,
like a sunrise,
In all directions,
too great for human kind,
But not the soul,
singing, silent, watching
In endless birth,
the reason beyond itself.

—

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