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Posts Tagged ‘Poetry’

I am tired but cannot sleep
Or will not readmit the silent night.

I kneel before the kindled fire
Humbly warmed before its roar.

Its kiss and crackle a comfort
On the round silent dark day.

A skim of dreams caught and lost,
A habitual melancholic stare.

The cats are curled and silent,
Heads held thus, angled, ears ready.

They slip, too, bolsters between worlds,
Watching new ghosts stumbling
Unacquainted with their freedom.

Long held time caught fire
And vanishing up in smoke:
Each a metaphor for all.

A cup of words swilled and tasted,
A meal meagre but stilling echoes.

Eyes will close and close again:
The bright dream fields of morning.

And those I had forgotten,
Still waiting, one door swinging shut,
One door, opening out soundlessly.

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UNDOING

Sitting without time,
Outwith its wild unheard roar.

Moments snowmelt vanishing,
Undoing forgiven, unknowing acquiesced.

Oh, Birds of dawn, the hills are laced with cold.
Blue air placid, blanket weighed.

A roll of mist is daybreak,
A disassembly of constellations.

Sky ceiling lifts and breathes out.
Two ravens sliding sideways blackly.

The simplest lessons hardwon:
To rest without time,

All hungers melted.

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In Shattered Riddles

IN SHATTERED RIDDLES

Greed is born of hunger.
Hunger, born of emptiness.
Emptiness, just a misinterpretation
Of the void.

This breath:
The simplest prayer.
An acquired silence,
Acquainted with all sorrows.

Horror has the best stories.
Hell has all the heroes,
Heaven: countless promises of light,
The cold dark of utter depth.

Sere the serried flow,
The rattled grains of ice rain.
All rivers begin in heaven,
Always falling, falling.

In shattered riddles
The endless winter.
Fleet our bones,
Sleet our marrow,
Gristle our cold souls,
Holding on.

We skim and glide,
Moonlight on snow.
A north wind tatters memory
That fragments and alludes
To another now.

As when those dreams of falling
Bring us suddenly awake
In dark silence,
A moment nameless
And wondering.

The fast skimmed cloud,
The fast glide of tattered light.
Scent of snow, scent of ice.

Year on year the small cold accumulates:
A speeding summer cannot melt it all.
In sunless places grows our glacial calm
That will outrun us with its final weight,
Slow grinding, a digestion of alternatives,
Downhill to the oceanic, a new beyond,
Unloosed, unbridled, unbodied.

—-

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Imbolc Eve

The barking of dogs.
Hills white as sheep, as arched, as silent.
God’s simple smile is the morning sun.

A full moon pregnant with light, last night,
And always the river and a promise of birdsong.

The red dogwood, the orange willow
All blameless and bright.

We shall see, it seems, another Spring
Lean by the fireside, thin in the frosted mornings.
Shivered water, vacant sky.

Day begins with dusk, a folding in of light.
Sheltered in byre and sleep.
A new breath in before a sigh and singing white.

Dry old pine cracks and roars.
We must wait a while for bones to warm.
Faces searched for, no longer seen,
Lost along the long stretched roads.

Thin is the light, pale as primrose.

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I have left a soft, small light
So as not to wake the ones I love.
Rising in the long and cold
Of frosts and dark morning..

Gone to kindle a new hearth,
To catch with tinder
The last left light,
To warm the space distant as holy.
A bloom, a bud pushed through,
A green something from soily ground.

I have left a soft small light,
Like all those others who have,
In their tumbling watching heavens,
So as to never lose place,
So as to one day, quietly slip back home,
Or at least, at very least, know for once
From whence we, longing, drifted,
Wandered, a dream untrenched,
Not dimmed by mornings.

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LLYM AWEL. Verse 4. Improvisations.

Oer gwely pisscaud ugkisscaud iaen;
Cul hit, caun barywhaud;
Birr diuedit, guit gvyrhaud.

“Fishes’ cold bed, ice sheet a shelter;
Thin stag, bearded grass;
Short day’s end, trees bent.”

1
Cold world.
Sheet ice
A shelter for fish.

2
Ice sheets:
A shelter for fish.
This cold world.

3
Cold world, below ice
The slow fishes shelter.
Gaunt and haggard
Is the stag stumbling thin
Amongst tough tufts,
The grass tussocks stubble.
Day ends sharply.
Short the light
Slewed to darkness.
Not heat nor light enough,
The trees tired
And weep bent.

4
No delight the meagre light
Cropped sunlight,
A short curtail
Sudden day’s ending.

5
Sheet of ice:
At least a cold shelter,
A cold bed for fish,
Safe and slow
Beneath a sleep drift,
A flick, a dark, viscous world.
Above, we turn grey,
Bent thin and fade.
No light,
Heavy the bowed trees
Bent boughs
Thin branches bob
And the stag,still,
Gaunt in grey grasses.

6
No heart to linger on
Bent trees at day’s end.
Stuttered the stag, shrugged thin,
Here and there
Between stubbled grey grasses.
No heart, the trees bent over.

7
No heart left,
The dark trees bend heavy, bowed down.
The matted grasses,
Neither food nor bed,
The thin stag wanders through a starved,
Sudden end to the day.

8
Starved, the thin day fails fast.
No heart, the trees bow heavy.
Grey, stubbled grasses,
No food, nor shelter-
The thin stag stands lost
At failing light.
At least the fish beneath the ice
Find shelter, a cold bed
Of sorts.

9
Cold bed.
Day dims.
Under ice, the river flows.
Cold bed, slow fishes shelter.
Cold bed, but not for the thin stag.
Grey the grasses, matted wan.
Day light gutters,
No heart, trees bend down.

10
Thinned streams divided
A guttering light
Sound of water under ice,
A cold bed laid over all.
Ice sheet, a withering away.

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Motionless

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1
In motionless dark shivered with starlight
A low roar not from road nor wind.
Ten thousand firs in stillness stirring,
Twined convocation a thousand valley oaks
Or little river Dulais its rippled bed piled up
Become two miles accumulated rush.
Or whispered leaving souls rising, losing weight,
Drawn towards new light, free, tumbling
Between branch and bough and cold airs

2
Scoured hollow the heart, diminished in each small death.
Close by the hedge an old dog lain below frosted ground
The weight of winter, time worn thin.

3
Night sky frozen cold
Stuttered shivered stars
Worn thin, restless

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These hollowed mountains, older than God,
Silent as Sundays, nursing rain and cloud,
And a clamour of downward waters.

Their slopes and sides are vowels,
Gutteral consonant: their crags
And rock-roofed alleys.

Hunched hands, their deep, rooted grasp
Throwing off spin and galactic centuries.
Time themselves do they assiduously weave:
Long blankets of brown and green,
A heathered tweed and bluebells,
Cried through, a thread of kite and hawk.

Long the slope that spits splintered bone.
At evening, those sharp-eyed fires
And the watching dogs that greet and howl
The name of each ghost, every whisper from the wood,
The long and soon dead, the turning, slow, small folk.

Jarred boughs here do never bend in pain,
Tracking sun’s warmth, laying memory in circles,
Pooled and stretched out beyond year on year.
A balance of the in and out, dawn and disaster.

This rise and fall of heaven, slap of compassion,
A weight waiting to awaken, a spark of circumference,
A hedge to the commonest sense.
Ground down to grit and simple soils,
The grey slate washed midnight clean,
Scoured sinless and unexpectant,
Eyes ever upwards,
Each glorious dawn.

—-

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STANDSTILL

Frown-dark hill

Red kite’s raw call

Still valley wood

Snaked silver streams

Low sun shudders.

Thin flask shivered:

One day moon

Necklace silver

Cool stream sliced

Bedded deep

Winter night.

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ADVENT

Bran’s tousled head hangs eloquent
From every night-burned alder.

Rust red are the wounded bracken hillsides,
Sour the long sedge.

Steep is the road,
All distance vapour.

Every hedge, a calligraphy of secrets
Taught by italic rains, slanted weather.

The trees stripped to syllables,
Each a sharp tongue and a scourge for empty vastness.

All glory hidden,
Sunk into the small, warm hearts of huddled things.

In barn and byre,
A shuffled silence,

Summer days mulled over,
Scented green against the cold.

Anointed, we are, with slow light,
Awaiting an older cermony:

A star in the east.
A sure opening and a soft, certain closing.

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