Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, mystery, New Year, Poetry, the liminal, time, tradition, Wales on January 15, 2017| Leave a Comment »
MARI LWYD 4
This dream we cling to
As if it were the only dream.
This wind, these hills,
This heart so tattered,
So threadbare.
Scoured even,
Stretched thin,
Worn down.
A whisper in the rain.
A word forming in the pines.
Winter shows the bones
Of what is, of what
Will remain,
Of what the old songs sung.
This has been your life
Down to this frozen moment,
This darkening path,
Distant laughter,
Sparks spinning
From the bobbing torches.
Shall we go on?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Mari Lwyd, photography, Poetry, tradition, Wales on January 15, 2017| Leave a Comment »
MARI LWYD 3
We follow sightless bones
Through the narrow door into a New Year
Because white bones and sightless eyes
Are the only things ever to pass through
From now to the future.
The wise will wander aimlessly,
Lost, discussing the dark paths, the short cuts,
The less muddy way.
We will stumble drunk and aimless
And find the warm door
And ask the right question
And fall to sleep
As the voices laugh
And roar
And the light
Slowly rises and fades.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Mari Lwyd, New Year, photography, Poetry, the numinous, tradition, Wales on January 15, 2017| Leave a Comment »
A sequence of connected works, or variations, to do with Time, New Year, tradition and mysteries. The Mari Lwyd, (‘Grey Mare’) is a horse’s skull decorated and carried on a long pole that goes round houses on New Year’s Eve exchanging banter for food and drink. It seems like a really ancient tradition and has the edgy, initiatory, feel of the oldest of memories.
Part One
MARI LWYD
A fluid darkness, a slow river wind.
Wild torches taste change, sparks tumbling into tomorrow.
We follow laughing, the Mari Lwyd with the wild futures
As all before have done this New Year’s Eve in the old valleys
Lost in the darkness, these hills watching, loomed.
Following the Grey Mare who tests the wit and want,
And begs for food and the oblivious warmth of drink,
To remember and forget the fading paths, the slender chance,
The fatal message.
A laconic nightmare stirred up for a vigilance and a testing,
Slick and breathed upon with frost death, breath white sheet cloud,
An ectoplasmic emission, the dancing myth of earth,
A decay and return of Time to its rightful round.
Not a horse of this world, patient in the paddock.
A night horse, all will ride willy-nilly,
And a rough ride or a wild drunk banter.
We ride the words, we ride the stories, into the night.
The torches are well made, but will still gutter and die in dawn’s drizzle.
Mari Lwyd is mute this year – no wit left amongst these sundered tribes,
No one can recite the triads, utter the names of things, the innuendo beneath the sheet.
We rake over ashes, but for want of fuel the fires will die
(And perhaps they should, perhaps they should).
A new fire, the valley snaking north, caught glorious in a winter dawn.
The light slides deep, across pale oaks and forest boughs,
Slides with shifting cloud across the tops, across the fields.
The bones of things dressed in warmth,
But it is only the bones of things that will ever pass
Through and along and between the long nights,
And into the death and birth of years.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, cold morning, dawn, landscape, landscape photography, mist, mountains, nature, Poetry, Wales, Winter on December 31, 2016| 14 Comments »
Ice Breath
Is it not true
That it is always the past
We burn to keep ourselves warm?
The young sun
Is on the tops now,
The deep valleys shadowed,
The mists let go, rise and melt away.
One slow hawk
Skims the treetops.
The cold, still sky
Has yet to choose its colour.
Ice will soon breathe,
relax to water,
Struck by the
warm weight
of light.
Those
that have survived
the night
Will stir
and sing.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, awareness, belonging, connection, darkness, existence, landscape photography, night, Poetry, presence, world on December 29, 2016| 2 Comments »
The Blossoming Magnitude
I step out.
Thick darkness
And above night fog.
A few stars come and go.
This world
We cannot ever leave.
Every inch of us
Reeled out from its heart.
Made to stretch
And grow and fade
Between each breath
And each stillness,
Between each moment
Of presence and absence.
The world pushes through.
Wherever we might go
This world, too, shall come.
We are seamless
And utterly loved.
A fragment only
In strange fragmented minds
That do not realise the utter silence
Contains the voices of all.
The utter silence that answers us
Is the blossoming magnitude
Of the simple ground.
A round flicker of star,
Tasted, acknowledged, named.
Never are we severed,
Never lost, nor alone,
Though the angry, hungry tide
Of voices may say it.
Our science is love
And our gravity, delight.
Obedient to our breath,
We come and go,
Remembering how it all goes.
A bowl of sky.
A bowl of earth.
Enough food there is
For all things.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cold, darkness, hope, longest night, night, Poetry, standstill., star hymns, stars, time.space, Winter, winter solstice on December 22, 2016| 8 Comments »
Solstice stars.
Stand still.
Take stock.
Light is short,
The cold is long.
No matter how secure
We are only ever one breath
Away from death.
From becoming fallow earth,
From falling frozen onto ice.
Take heed
Stand still.
The small time.
The long night.
In darkness
The slow drips slow,
Then stop completely.
Stars watch
And sing
Though offer little warmth,
But the way home,
The way home.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Abergwesyn, art, landscape, landscape photography, Mid Wales, Poetry, rivers on December 17, 2016| 1 Comment »
The long song
1
Pwll Bo, where the waters swirl the colour of trout,
As brown as deep sunlight and the taste of peat.
Shadowed is the heathered hue ( whose voice
White as lightning sings to the oldest of things,
Though few may know it except the ghosts
Of wanderers lost and found by starlight,
And the fastness of owl-bright silence
And the stillness of hills in their watchfulness.)
Pwll Bo and then the Washpool and then on,
Down to the church and then the town.
Everything murmurs in its own language.
The river’s accent rushes from wild to soothing
To wild again.
Clouded, the eye of this precinct night
Lost in dream that seems to be remembrance, but is not.
A doppler drift of slow, utterly endless forgetting.
2
Singing the long song
Pwll Bo roars white and whispers.
Water turning hills to soil.
3
Pwll Bo
Spirit song
Mountains to soil
Sunlight to trees
Water to life.
Weaving sound
A throat of rock.
White, roaring water.
Hollowed rock
A mouth of song.
Thunder whispers.
Sunlight and shade.
A rivered voice.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged annwfn, archetypes, art, daemons, debris, dreams, Earth Mind, Ideal, landscape photography, mind, Otherworld, Poetry, recycling, Secret Commonwealth, sentience, waste products on December 5, 2016| Leave a Comment »
White with snow are the hills on the horizon.
The rivers are quiet, the pools frozen.
Clouds from the north taste bitter cold sunrise.
The deep, dark, breathing earth accumulates to itself,
As if the threads and shreds of shared sentience
Net down the long years and become soaked
With drip and ceaseless dream, each wish and ache
And spark of memorable brightness,
Catalogued, compacted, savoured, saved.
And with these do they clothe themselves: in a world’s memories
And thus, learn to speak in howls and long whispers,
An aesthetic without emotion, a dance only, a game, a chess board,
A gwyllbwyll, a ritual that is not quite imitation nor mirroring
But has its own exquisite golden reason,
A long dreaming sublimation of spent and careless thought.
All these cobwebs and leaves, they are truly
the only gold to be cherished.
The damp and fusty decay of life thrown off,
Carefully considered and gathered again for feasts of kings and angels
And dark giant forms that have no concern for any future,
but nurture the past cradled in deeper woods, rocked in song,
Draped in arcane languages, swung on sunless, starless seas,
Shattered on mirrored starry pools and fountains.
A moment too slow for this world’s water
( a dream of even clearer water, a blood clear river,
a serpent spiral of cool life,
Silver water, perfect loom of water,
eternal life giver, rock cooled, cave silent,
Tremulous with distant footfalls, distant light.)
More real than the real, more real than time,
more present so it is squeezed between each chink
Of time and space, our substratum, our mother matter,
our folded vast and black pinions,
Our beautiful storm, our glory and tragedy,
our mulch of words.
To where all words sink and their images too,
to reform, re-loved beautiful monsters, free from doubt,
Unburdened of guilt, violent and innocent,
purely, demurely selfish and sharing the virtues of edge and shadow.
Ploughed deep in the dark trenches,
the midnight river boat of sun and moon,
sung with choir of gods and stars and lascivious,
long limbed goddesses born for pleasure.
They will swallow us all, open up and consume,
become fecund and full and birth us over and over,
their lovers named and unnamed, loved and laid to rest.
The smallest of things, a feast of passion most holy.
Most holy the earth and its names,
most holy the mystery beneath us,
the mirror within us, the eyes, the feral eyes,
the hungry eyes that look back
and do not ever, ever, look away.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged and such-like dreary leaden thoughts, art, emotion, endings, existence, landscspe photography, mystery, night, Poetry, sorrow, war, Winter on November 29, 2016| 2 Comments »
—
Soulless
To come out from the sorrow with wings
(The wind rising deepening thick darkness)
To find song that sings continuance
(The rain flown miles burns cold)
To find a haven, a hammocked clarity
(No stars, nor shadow, nor moon tonight)
The long roads aching empty, dreary, full of tears
(Lightless, limp, dreams splintered, knowing not the way to try)
Over the hills, bleak white drift forces itself into crevice and bank.
A slow, tempered piano hangs notes and melody, not new, nor remembered.
It echoes so and brings some small pillow of ease.
Firelight flickers,
All sink sleepless into dream.
A small thing it is to fail,
to cease, to become unmattered.
(The street empty, the empty house,
The mind revolving. The heart of things,
A sudden distance).
—-
simonhlilly 
Conversations: Invisible Friends at a Year’s Ending
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, asides, comment, commentary, friends, gold leaf, ideas, inspiration, Poetry, Ryokan's Mind Moon Circle, wall relief, wood relief carving on December 26, 2016| 2 Comments »
this dreaming breath
named from a confluence
long streams tumbled for a while
on the meticulous dance of sun and moon
clothed in scars and mystery, veiled, draped about.
shaped by a host, a singing constellation of unnamed stars.
—
Having been in the woods
One may never come out.
Though scrupulous,
A whisper breath will still
remain, like the memory
Of mulch in the nostril,
The coolness of the skin,
The crack of twig, a cobwed brush.
We become inhabited-
The same as we ghost
Forgotten places.
Murmur.
Reverie interupted.
—
Leonard
This poet’s voice.
Like honey,
Like an earthquake.
A gentle mountain
With thunder.
Sun and rain,
we smile, we cry.
All vistors
With return tickets.
—
Heart’s warmth, the only sustaining fire.
We are huddled beings, backs to the night,
glorious in our strangeness, bred for our dreams.
Peculiar are the haunted songs echoing,
peculiar the views we insist upon, peculiar the words,
peculiar the moments.
revivified by the lightest touch,
ignited by the slightest breath,
flowered and flowering,
the thinnest web of cells strung together,
pushing outwards,
holding back,
translating silence.
—
This one breath
Is ours.
Then than
Too,
Is gone.
This stream
Of word
Caught in a
Flashlight
Moment
Then
Lost.
Remembering
What is
No longer.
A wonder!
—
Her shell-like,
Bending low to this little earth.
She will turn away
In sorrow and disbelief
Fall and fade
And become dark
And empty
Once more.
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