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Posts Tagged ‘Poetry’

In Winter Hills

A shallow
cold stream
of inconvenient air
Is winter in the shaped and cocksure city.
It fills only the void between buildings
And the thin, guttering bones of the homeless.
But a raw six months is winter
In the hills of the northern world.
It builds itself a dance of long-knived layers,
Sucking heat through the ice-spangled drills of starlight,
Peels back and back the year’s green thrust,
Draws out a most echoing hollow certainty
That just one wrong turn, one unlucky day
And this thin, frayed thread shall splay,
Split red and run itself to mud, to ice,
To empty earth, to earth a carcass chord,
A final cold bed,
concluded iron,
sighed
silent
mulch.

—

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Llym Awel, second stanza. Improvisations.

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Ton tra thon, toid tu tir;
Goruchel guaetev rac bron banev bre;
Breit allan or seuir
.

The alliteration of the first line rolls and rumbles like the waves that are described therein, then stutters and becomes harsh as the roaring sound is described, followed by a diminishing gentleness of the vanquished sloping land. The last line has a shocked gulping sadness, or an amazed sorrow. It frames and positions the narrator in an emotional as well as a natural landscape.

“Wave on wave, covering the side of the land;
Very loud the roar against the high hill;
A wonder anything remains.”

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Wave tops wave.
A coupling clamber
A mating roar,
cast seed
spray spume.
Before one, before all,
up sloping land.
Seige unopposed,
howled hunger thrown,
A wild encroachment,
a burst breach
Long and longer reach,
a tumble.
The high hill groans.
What can stand,
what can stay?
From this slide skywards,
From this steep,
utter submergence?
—

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Desert Songs(2)

Lulled by light, long and low.
Warm winds, fled with birdsong.
Distant rises the muezzins’ heart,
A hive of bees, nectar-fed.
The sands lift to colour the air,
A wave of snakes, a river in time.

—

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Blink

BLINK

Days of endless sun.
Thought and purpose
Slowly lift, shimmer, evaporate.
Staring at white horizons.
Blink.
Dog pack saunters
From shade to shade
Sniffing flowerbeds.
Blink.
Sand took form,
An antlike persistence
In the angled walls,
Windowless, shadowed.
Blink.
Ink-slow waves
In a gelatinous evening.
The winding path,
A hum of far generators.
Blink.
A camel yawns,
A cat scratches.
Blink.
Palm trees
Practice the mudras
Of elegance,
Lifting and falling
In a rippled breeze.
Blink.
The turquoise sea –
A clear calm eye.
This trembling smile
Of shoreline.
Blink.
The low land, reluctant,
Drinks sweat and blood,
Who would be content
With only water and love
And a settling of peace
To bloom with wild and lonely greens
( a song of shade and a same old longing-
Moon and moonlight).
Blink.
The small birds flit
The fast small hawk.
A flash of feather alley-fast
And soaring minaret,
A calligraphy of vowels,
A calligraphy of gesture.
A moment threaded through the blue
And sunlit sand.
Blink.
A sudden upright green,
A wash of convinced colour –
Reward for winter rains.
Blink.
Blink.

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Desert Voices.

Violet sky.

A woman

Is the air,

Dancing.

Wind,

The audience.

A silent world.

—

A silent world.
Waiting
For the footprints
Of saints.

Dust and sand
Dancing in lines.

In the heat,
Shadows melt away
To nothing.

—

Shadows melt away
To nothing.
Birds hop
From tree to tree.
Cat sits still,
Rolls and stretches.

—

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Aeons of fast skies
Have worn smooth these hills.

Chosen colours have rubbed in,
Silence folded into sound.

These lacing waters,
These rock dark ribs.

A breath of rain,
A consideration of leaves.

A subtle exchange,
A movement towards earth.

—

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KNIFE MOON

In the dark hills
Sons and daughters
Are learning how to kill,
Accurate remorselessness,
The wages of sin.

Down in the valleys
Translucent owls
Kill with God’s own
Gentle hand, guiltless
Down the hedgerows.

A knife moon glimmers,
Clouds severed
On a southern wind.

Out in the whispering,
Rainbow dark
The ghosts of shepherds,
Faithful dogs by their sides,
Long for the drifting flocks,
The steady roll of seasons.

Above the old forge,
The blacksmith’s arms
Aching with joy.
He dreams his cherry-red children,
A quenching thrust,
The soft pink blushing-
His sigh and smiling wife.

The warmth of our blood
We suck from the past.
Our heartbeat, passed on,
Down from when
Her eyes first opened.
We should be content
To simply sing our song
Then wait in silence,
Comforted.

Rain, again, on the glass.
Mist clings to the roots of hills.
The larch, tousled, twisted gold, leaning.
The grasses pale.

Warmth and good memory –
The past, our sweetest water.
A moderation for cold and bitter fires,
The burnished lies and stolen beauty.

—-

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From our door
The river we see
Is named ‘river’.
The mountain on the horizon
Is ‘mountain’.
But the woods,
The woods,
Are named from whispers,
And the farms
From grief and joy.

Belonging
Is not a gift
Nor a right.
It lives in an open heart
Free from reasons
And excuses.

The old stag oak
Now wears a crown of gold,
The ash and alder wear
Empty sky.

All roads arrow straight,
But for their bends.
All hills are green
From a certain distance.

The rivers run full
After a night’s rain
And the sun is stretched
And etched with rainbows.

There is not a promise
That it cannot be forgotten.
There is not a day
That cannot be glorious.

—

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The final two sections of this work have waited a long time to emerge. The exploration of the angelic spheres simply needed arranging, but the final section on the Highest Sphere, I had no idea how to proceed with, until one recent morning, the words flew out of themselves.

—

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Causatum primum esse creatum primum pricipium omnium creaturarum continens in se creaturas. ( First effect, first created being, pricipal of all creatures, containing all creatures within itself)

It has been months now,
Perhaps years, perhaps lifetimes,
Wandering, flying north, reaching upwards.
Lost and dreaming in the folds of space.
Without affirmation, without calibration,
Lost in uncertain geometries,
Torn by laws of motion
And too certain theologies.
Beyond the rational, beyond the poetic,
A mind running regardless,
Generating language, souls and wings.

Materia in potentia (passive receptacle)
Forma in potentia (Pure Act)

Here in the thin silences
Every river has become
Clear white and single streams,
The seven rivers ceased.
Now, a simple irrigation of sound.
A First Cause, before it takes sides,
Turns demons cloaked in thunder
And dark collateral engines of despair,
Innocent and mirroring the forceful
Wells within us, deeper than bone.

Creator omnium Deus -Causa Prima – Voluntas divina – voluntas divina. ( The Creator of All, God, the First Cause, The Divine Will, The Divine Will)

There is nothing grand about the First.
Nothing magnificent, nothing golden.
The smallest shudder, an imperceptible stretch
Before any decision to inflate,
Any smudge of granulation,
Any furrow of rotation.

An indeterminate number of souls –
All the ghosts of past and future –
Holding back, though longing
To explode within:
The only fuel, the only food, the only song.
The geometers approach, but tangle their measures.
The geomancers learn the dance, weigh the odds.
The elders nod and drool.
The angels consume themselves eternally
In flaming passion, revolving.

Only the weeds in the meadow give utterance to it,
And that so sublime, it makes less sense
Than the grasshopper’s click
And geiger song of cicadas.
Doppler shift.
It forms on disappearance,
It shapes and sings with distance.

A flaming torch falling,
A roar through shaped voids.
Cast out, returned, circumferential, pointless.

All the words have emptied out,
And yet more form and flow –
An endless road,
A glistening heaven
Made of rock,
A mistaken sky.

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LONG NIGHTS

It is the very egg of long nights:
Still and black, a light rain falling.

The cats peer silent from windows,
The long fire slowly fades and whispers.

In the garden there will be slugs,
Stately, weaving their own fine galactic trails.

Beyond, in the meadows, glimmering sheep
Will nonchalantly chew, nod and say grace,
Nod and say grace.

There will be owls and a scurry of mice.
And there will be dreams sliding
Between the in and the out of breath,
A tower of worlds, made and unmade,
A cascade of tomorrows in dark and light.

For most, (but never for all),
There will be a slow dawn.
A new wind from the hills,
A resumption: nets and hooks set
Eager to catch time, labelled, minuted,
Used, misused, wasted.

But not now,
Not now.
Not in this one vessel of darkness:
One long curve holding curved void.

Not distinguished are the living or the dead.
All are quiet ghosts
Tasting the certain past
And this turning, rolling, cooling night air.

—

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