Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, darkness, landscape, landscape photography, midsummer, night, Poetry, relativity, resonance, Wales on July 26, 2016| 3 Comments »
Midsummer night occluded.
Clouds rent slow and pale light.
One rolled silent tumble
Psalming more for gentle gods.
Rising, falling the hills
And through them threaded
Rising, falling hours of owls.
Weeping wonder
Well gone before done,
A brief flick and dreamer dreaming.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged chapels, landscape, Merhodism, photography, Poetry, Wales on July 25, 2016| 7 Comments »
CAPEL
1
Prayers fledged fluttering hungry to heaven.
Sins numbered, piled up on threadbare Sundays.
Precious is the clear sound of running water in high summer drought.
Clear-throated the hymns from the strong men drunk in praise.
These chapels set dour and grey against the weather God tests them with.
A pungent slow burning peat, this faith of farm work and school mistress.
2
Beyong the roof of human pride
Where Time slows, then stops, then turns to stone
(Mapping out the green bloom, the grey wheel of lichen breath)
Counting down the centuries ’til Eternity
There floats the height of the day and the meat crow dancing:
Poised upon life and death, the line they know so fickle and thin.
3
Drab with the spew of winter and as bitter as Jeremiah
Polished pine slows each musty sunbeam.
Bent arcing benches, each pew a hierarchy strained forward towards the throne,
Concentric jury leaning in to catch spark,
Dazzled is the ignition of the Word.
Burned up in glory or despair
(The cast-iron certainty, the stinging blister of guilt).
Now silence swallowed again, head bowed, the creak of doom summoned.
An enunciated slow pronouncement from other deserts
To a lost people, outnumbered, outmanouvred, dispossessed.
Gather ye in these bleak barns, ye Chosen lost and living yet.
Humbled together, take tea of Christ and God’s new supper.
A thin brew and be thankful for that: there is nothing else.
But better beyond the doors of Time and a hope of warmth and light
And just rewards for a drudge of work in mud and ice and rain,
And a voice of thunder and delight of which the organ sings,
so strong and sweet.
Notes: Wales is full of Non-Conformist Chapels. Every village had one, two, three, barn-like constructions looming over the lanes. Though they are dour and weatherworn now, the ones that have escaped becoming trendy private houses, can be very impressive, with wonderful wooden interiors. The photographs show the interior of our village chapel that originally dates from the 18th century. Gosen Capel is named after the Land of Goshen in the Nile Delta where the Hebrew tribes were settled so as not to upset the urban Egyptians. There is an irony here with the Old Testament histories and the plight of the rural poor of 18th and 19th century Wales. The egalitarian and popular nature of Methodism addressed the general populations in a way that the established churches had no wish to do, as they were supported and run by the educated and Anglicised gentry.
The ‘height of the day’ and the ‘meat crow’ in the second part are literal translations from the Welsh of the names for skylark and raven.
.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged courage, holly, honour, initiation, metaphysics, mystery, peace, Poetry, tree spirits, vision dream on July 15, 2016| Leave a Comment »
—
A Precision of Holly
This is how it seemed
in the white midnight of midsummer,
with a whispered moon,
between waking and sleeping:
through a hushed land a procession made
of Holly Lords, strong eyes of peace,
and all together with Holly Ladies, so soft with love.
Soft and strong singing quiet with steady step,
tall and whip-like truth not tip-toeing
around the sleeping, not roaring but
tipping the world in a slow spin onward,
setting rhythm to rights and breathing
green pooled ease in the red ripening of it,
in the swell of seed and fat-juiced fullness of it.
Dark in sunlight, pale glimmering in shade,
an equipoise of attentive judgement,
a precise distinction making room for joy,
an opening upon a narrow sky,
a cooling and a warming of blood,
too hot and too cold, wrapped, held, woven.
A statement, a clear intent, an incense risen up,
a perfected purification, a curved calm vector towards peace.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, dawn, landscape photography, night, Poetry, Wales on July 13, 2016| 4 Comments »
—
DARK MOON RIVER
Dark moon
river runs eyeless.
pools star-filled and silent
then dawn in honey cherry ink
stretched, spun silent,
a planet’s edge mating space
though most are dreaming
so miss the wide breath of beginning
a placid fire before an invention of green
all blue it is, and utter peace,
and the mist, like smoke, hangs upon the hills.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged doom and gloom, Lamentations of Jeremiah, Poetry, politics, rant, referendum, stupidity on July 9, 2016| Leave a Comment »
SCURRY
The dull slurs of the fooled seep slurry on good.
Oil waves curious and more black than rainbow’s slime
Away from any mirror face. We are wan:
Sucked in, fleshed out and blown dusty.
Of no consequence the numbers,
Of no weight the true sorrow.
The push through will be fool courageous,
A more destroying certainty.
No weight, no way beyond a crippled moment
Sluiced and slopped down,
History wiped clean regardless.
Robotic minions clichė.
The house is burning,
The demons above in the sky.
A blind archangel shall slay all who move, insouciant,
Temperance scoffed at.
The feast of too much and too late.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Chinese poetry, landscape, landscape photography, Poetry, rain, summer, Wales, Wang Wei on July 7, 2016| 2 Comments »
a landscape for wang wei
the big hills
have gone visiting
the sky
in slanting rain
the green trees
dance and mime
incense rises
curving through all space
the window is a shrine,
an offering to silence
old men suck tea
and talk of distant troubles
i will paint in green
and grey and gold
a solitary bumblebee
wends its way
amongst comfrey
and wormwood.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, bardic rant and racing rhythm, flow, force of life, life, nature photography, Poetry, space, Taliesin, the ghost of Dylan, the poet's voice, time on July 5, 2016| 2 Comments »
BRIGHT WAVE
he drives the drivel words
as spittle with his tongue,
a brush to paint a world his God loves
but cannot say without him,
without the mad thrust of red on palette,
a knife to scrape around and fill a pretty canvas
of the salt and the sea and cans of history
and glory of the body of the boys
and flouncing, daylight, breezy girls
who are the souls shining of something much greater,
(though the boys taunt and laugh
and point rude and thrusting
in the open aired blowing weather).
And the canter of Time slows,
then whipped on, races on, on beyond,
never taking stock much but breeding more
and eating all the progeny of stars
in one great, great hunger.
Slow, slow then.
Slow and weep and wonder
at the thin veil, so strong and mysterious.
A cat’s paw, a cat’s eye, a cat’s patience.
A graceful kill is all the fun there is here.
A grace certain, and final, and laughing away
the sadness, and the roar of rivers,
always the roar of rivers, going through.
—
Still In Flight
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, art, cliff face, gateways, landscape photography, otherwords, Poetry, portals, Preseli bluestone, rock surface, stars, Wales on June 28, 2016| 6 Comments »
Preseli Meditations (Rock Signs)
Eye
Is a palindrome,
As is
Sees.
Voices distant
Speak in tongues
From cracks in rock
Split open by light.
—
Split open
By light
A heaven swing
Through star roads.
A cloud hymn
And the sing of insects.
—
The sing of insects
Deep in winter.
Sunlight clicks
Its fingers.
One door opens.
Another closes.
—
Another closes
Creeps seeps
Through the
Butter of time,
The honey of space.
Dressed in bones
They come
Rolling down
With news
From heaven.
—
From heaven
Fingers prise
The smallest chink.
An eye blinks
The mirror
Cracked becomes
A door.
Backwards the
Paths lead
Backwards to
The beginning.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged forest, Haiku-ish, landscape, landscape photography, landscape.art, Poetry, senses, summer, Wales, woods on June 22, 2016| Leave a Comment »
Walking further than intended
A river breeze in the tree tops
And below, streams of birdsong.
—
The grasses are shooting green
But still in forest shade
The violets in full bloom.
—
A running stream
A cowslip sky.
At the forest’s edge,
The scent of green.
—
Deep in the woods
Violets bloom where no-one sees.
Perfected in themselves,
Complete within silence.
—
Allowed to breathe here
By the forest’s edge
This cowlip sky
A river wind in the treetops.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged forest, landscape, landscape photography, light, midsummer, Poetry, stars, summer, Wales on June 12, 2016| Leave a Comment »
CANOL HAF
(Midsummer)
a cowslip sky
above butter mountain.
the white waters whisper-
no rain for a week now.
the summer stars i have all renamed
and are become dear places i have loved.
and the faces that float smiling
as i sleep, shine warm as sunlight
in bee-blessed gardens.
—
simonhlilly 