On long tides
The rivers rest.
Longer than
Long moments
Of memory.
Swaying words
Swinging between meanings.
Lost days
Remembered and forgotten,
Sweet details, seasons.
Posts Tagged ‘Poetry’
On Long Tides
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged languid, memory, mind, moments, Poetry, seasons, thought, tides on January 27, 2014| 2 Comments »
Tallis Exultant
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged atmosphere, dawn, full moon, landscape, light, moon, music, nature, Poetry, Thomas Tallis, world on January 17, 2014| 2 Comments »
TALLIS EXULTANT
Golden moon rests
Upon a throne of low cloud.
All night long-
As bright as day.
Dawn shall not diminish her:
Sinking radiant
Into new lands.
A long music,
A choir of days.
Tallis exultant.
—
Subject as Object
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged collective, consciousness, group, non-self, Poetry, reality, self-, the owning of consciousness on January 9, 2014| 19 Comments »
THE SUBJECT AS OBJECT,
OBJECT AS GROUND
OF BEING.
ON EDGES
AND BELONGINGS.
Tat tvam asi
(That I am)
How to merge,
how to remain,
how to see beyond corners,
in darkness wells.
In deserts,
the sand-filled mouths of raving saints.
In forests,
the still elegance of shadowed eyed.
How to merge, yet remain.
How to allow in,
yet keep clambering upwards.
I.
Mistaken identity.
The signpost as the destination.
Cleverness and guile all our days,
we forget to let go the tight bands,
corsetted edge, held in,
possessed and unpossessed,
apart, separated,
vulnerable to elsewhere,
withered by time,
an erosion of horizons,
alluvial plains, fluvial deposits,
drumlins, morraines.
The debris of becoming something else.
A knot, nor a net.
Next, betwixt, between.
Amongst.
A singular deception.
A swell, a tide, a sea, a surge.
A chorus of voices.
Solar mansions.
A circle divided remains a returning path.
name me and I shall vanish,
dancing around the fire.
Foolishly,
I know all things,
but have forgotten how to dream,
and so am rootless
awaiting celestial bees.
Meander.
The great river.
The sky roofed path.
Wonder of wonders.
Breath out.
Looking,
it eludes us.
Remain still, somehow,
forgetting skin.
A vessel.
Is it form, is it emptiness?
Neither, nor, not.
No lessening is it,
ever, ever.
—–
A roaming around ideas on Self, what is ours, what is beyond, where memory might abide, and asking why should there be limits to our wonder.
Stirred by “Immunity” http://manoftheworld.wordpress.com. I am always a we, a cellular empire. I is also a view, a sharing and borrowing of voice.
Duet (two ghosts in blue mirror)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, autumn evening, blue ghosts, conversation, duet, golden leaves, image, landscape, nature, park paths, Poetry, polarity, words on January 8, 2014| 4 Comments »
DUET
(two ghosts in blue mirror).
a spontaneity of words by Simon Lilly and Jessica Ryan. This began when I commented on a picture Jessica published alongside her blog just before Christmas. http://soveryvery.wordpress.com.
It turned out quite nicely, I think, so here it is:
That image is what?
Ordinary, unspectacular, mute,
but made something perfect
by colour,detail and the art of looking.
Ambience Radiating Truth,
a little art.
The light, the air,
the moment.
A conspiracy for
rather than against me.
Maybe art is just that –
a conspiracy for.
A pattern infiltrated
and worn upon oneself,
a brief belonging.
All too brief.
And we gasp.
And we grasp after
the flickering perfection
of the pattern, seen.
Seen is eaten by heart,
head not withstood
(though best ignored
or humoured with thin smiles).
Seen is been seen,
marked by all, included, amongst.
We are twill, tweed, embroidered,
embroiled regardless of high or low regard.
Our guard is dropped,
melting into the passionless is.
Seen and consumed,
heart’s regard (less more high low)
is consummated.
Our guard,
an empty collection of warp and weft,
never understood the story of orange and blue.
A tunnelling path
carved through flickering time,
framed roads, named, unnamed,
tasted with hesitant tongue, delighted ear.
Pulsed, a walking rhythm,
a posy of moments, empty and full.
Shall we walk together down the long evenings,
birdsong and laughter,
or fear the empty bridge,
the shallowed gold pit?
A pocket full.
Ignore the hard edges
pretending the end.
The pellucid vibrancy spills out,
centers the path tickling the birdsong’s laugh
off of our tongues.
And so we shall.
What else to do with bursting moments
but walk the gloaming?
The gloomy gloaming
of the joker tomb.
Mock serious and smirking.
It cannot hold a moment longer,
bursting with radiate light.
We can afford generosity,
shedding skins, attaining orbits.
Starlit, wandering,
trying out new names with new lips,
forgetting, laughing at footprints:
leaf litter on an autumn path.
Lost once, lost twice,
a cliff of thought,
a tunnelled, mysterious evening.
Mapled flutter,
mapled collapse, mapled incense.
Hesitant even,
hastened steps, a whispered wind,
a small bowl of sorrow,
a small bowl of delight.
I’ve dreamed of a third bowl,
wobbling on its edge.
Its sound is round,
debating gravity and stillness.
A heart or notion, a simple holding,
a significator, the dreamer mirrored dream,
a season, a map, a world of half light and half dark,
rotating,
a long whispered vowel.
A calling between consonants.
Aggravating the spin,
hand to hand among the maple trim.
The cartography of my heart,
studied in your grin,
the sugar portending a notion of splendor
made dormant.
The punctuation pauses,
cupped, before the sound begins.
A sweet sound.
A sweet silence.
That path between, slyly negotiated:
a low sigh.
The rustle of the blood’s report.
The mirrored blush shies cheek
and dropping leaf.
Is this the place
where it all starts?
New Year’s Day
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged January, landscape, nature, New Year, New Year's day, Poetry, rain, Winter on January 2, 2014| 2 Comments »
NEW. YEAR’S DAY
A long blessing
Shunned and huddled against.
Rain in lines and columns –
Tall ghosts tramping flat the fields.
The valley crouches sodden,
Hill and distance dissolved to grey.
Things move as little as possible,
Only the sound of running water
Returning to restless distant seas.
—
Underpass
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Autumn, emotion, landscape, leaves, memory, park paths, Poetry, remebering, urban emptiness, Winter, words on December 28, 2013| 3 Comments »
UNDERPASS
Discarded words,
Crisp once now sodden spinelesss,
Losing colour
Swept down underpasses,
Damp and ammoniac,
An autumn of emotion,
Sullen sludge becoming inchoate wail.
Ripped from mind of one,
Falling into cascade of cliché,
The parcelled soap of millions,
Petty drama deified,
Rigorously abandoned
For the next scene.
Ghosts and leaves,
Both noun and verb
Are we become.
We have fallen into the sere….
Our own phantom menace,
The deeds we did and did not
Haunting the municipal paths,
Ifs and buts in overfilled bins
For late wasps of conscience
To drain some goodness out
And last the long winter
Sheltered in some crook of warmth.
Fire and fallen leaf
Flicker, send up incense,
A bonfire to remembrances
Found and lost,
Found and lost.
—–
A haunting image, subtle, empty, that graced the graceful words of Jessica Ryan’s blog post soveryvery.wordpress.com ‘One’s place’ is the spark for this flurry.
Small land
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged angel, dream, holy land, islands, landscape, Poetry, sea, thought on December 27, 2013| Leave a Comment »
SMALL LAND
Small islands that float in the sifting blue:
Prayers, memories, wishes once hoped for.
Clear bounded, unto themselves,
Harvesting thin birdsong
And tumps of long grasses singing.
Fragments of heaven remaining,
Never lifted, never fallen.
Salt-washed, self-rooted.
Rock black and rock red
And the twist of serpentine,
The healed scar of whited quartz.
A skirl of wind,
An ululation of gulls.
Warmth in the lee
Of the byre,
The soft scent of hay.
A hymn, a verse each is.
Inhabited by angels,
Their messages forgot,
Dreaming to the sound
Of long tides.
—
Christmas Carol Service
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged archetypes, Christmas, creativity, distractions, elegance of the simple, endless possibilities, formulating immanence and the nebulous, glory, goodness, grace, guiding goodness, hidden languages.a request for beauty and frugality, imagery, masks, mental aptterning, multiple meanings, perception, peripheral insights, Poetry, storytelling, symbols, templates, what moves and awakens on December 26, 2013| 2 Comments »
CHRISTMAS CAROL SERVICE
What we refuse to see, we dream.
What we refuse to dream, grows strong.
The roots and stones we rest on, groan.
By day and night our laborious weight increases.
Mass and energy, the great fall, the future rise.
Reconstructed are our histories, our reasons.
It is the bones that remain.
It is the bones we clothe
With fragments of colour,
Rouge and tinsel.
They mock us who
Do not delight in story
(Failing to see they, too, live enfictioned).
The essentials of life are child-like.
Delightful is the minute and the hour of silence.
Sustaining is the simple breath, the still gaze.
Listen, not even the stars, not even they, shuffle nor stir:
The middle of the night coagulating cold.
No thing can be blamed for this,
No thing blessed.
No distinction, no judgement.
An infinite web of choosing there is,
An eternity of outcomes.
Each path, unsigned, is sought out,
Followed.
No goal but a calling home.
We have lost elegance.
We have lost the subtle shades.
Our cochlear spirals numbed
In loud foolishness, indocrinated false memories.
Sleight of hand – the key always was and will be, distraction.
Watch the bright light, the movement of the shiny.
The doctrine of no ghosts, neither holy nor profane.
The bones.
It is the bones that shape us.
The bones of the ancestors,
The bones of the children,
The hidden, red-marrowed, singing bones
Inside us.
Mortice and tennon, ball, socket,
Vessel, rope, sinew, glistening cartilage.
The slide and pull of grace.
The dance of staying in one place,
( an interchange of coming and going, being and forgetting to be).
What stirs us,
(I mean to say),
Is the equation of balance.
Number clothed in colour,
Colour clothed in light,
Light clothed in philosophy,
A weighing and positioning of fulcra.
Forgetting that stillness
Is not absence
But presence.
Holographic ideogram,
Mala, a string of meaning,
Where things slip between names,
Where a blink sees more than.
Circumstantial, peripheral,
Ephemeral shall I be.
Beams and motes –
A matter of simple perspective.
The opposite must also be true to itself.
The grinding down of bones,
A fertilising dust.
Tears frozen and thawed,
The watering of life.
Turn out the light, dear,
The stars shall be enough.
—–
There is little logic in the arts of Christmas, nor is there any one cultural imprint. It is a mish-mash of archetypes and long-loved mysterious imagery. Thus this wandering of thought and layering of idea that flowed from finger to page this morning…… Reaching and goodness and redemption though, must surely be worthy ideals to construct neural pathways around. Seasons greetings to all and all.
Two Paths, Solstice.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Haiku-ish, hope, Poetry, prints, Solstice, standstill., sun, Winter on December 22, 2013| 16 Comments »
WHITE SUN
A white sun
Drags low its cloak
Of long shadows.
The whispered song is
Fierce starlight,
Bitter winds.
Fast, small life,
This little wren
Dives into ivy,
Chiding sudden rain.
Standing still
To watch
An old pause
In time,
A breath
Caught, held,
Witnessed.
The dance melancholic,
A glory retained.
Satin, smoothed,
It slips
So swiftly by:
Shortest day.
—-
TEETER, THE BRINK
Now is the dark time.
What shall we do but sleep
Or light a lamp.
Illuminate, dream.
Mould our visions,
Plant good seeds
In hope.
The fast bleak grasp
Throttles sense,
Extinguishes
Simple warmth.
Small goodnesses
Are left us only,
And so they must suffice.
Trust in a return,
Slow or sweeping.
What is unlooked for
Yet remains.
To become unswayed,
To cherish, to succour.
Each one to their own dance,
A trace of footsteps
Leading back
From the cliff’s edge,
A whisper, a hand,
The ghost
Of a chance,
A good continuance,
A very garden.
—–
simonhlilly 