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Posts Tagged ‘Poetry’

Our Music

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 18, 2012| 3 Comments »

OUR MUSIC
( for n. filbert)

Spiraling.
But up or down?
The heart moves in and out.
Its own rhythm.
Has no memory, no sorrow, no joy
(the wild geese cry, flying away,
Away to the horizon of light).
The heart has no words, no tears.
(What I cannot grasp – that resonant fullness
Of a dying chord).
The heart has no words-
The reason music is.

First words
laid down in thought,
Sketched, grasped
But lost.
The path between breathing in
And moving out,
A pull, a chord
A melody.
Formless form,
Existent for an instant.
Possibly enough to light a light –
A dying arc in the bubble chamber,
Proton, antiproton, quark –
A path measured but no longer
Reachable,
Signifying
What is no more.
(embellish, embroider, garnish,
In the end all stories are a rope
To cling to in our vast uncertainty).
The beautiful line of that decay,
Spiraling inward to surcease –
If it is not music, if it is not what is within music,
If it is not carried upon music,
It means less than nothing to the heart.
Attack, decay, sustain, release,
Attack, decay, sustain, release.

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Our Voices

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on December 17, 2012| 6 Comments »

OUR VOICE

Do we create
Or
re-create?
Remember,
Retreive,
Reconstruct,
What has gone before?

Ancestor’s
Back-brain commitees,
Manipulator’s of dream,
Or urge of the world’s word.
All, maybe, reaching for a hand, a tongue,
An instrument, sweet or loud,
To sing the old songs,
The forgotten histories.

A chorus, a fugue
Echoing through the aisles,
The wings, the ships, the stars,
Cathedrals of bone, temples of bone,
Resounding to the white noise –
The screaming sundering into time and space –
Nothing into something,
Something into something else.
Whispers of the first,
Pushing through to the last.

No choice, if the heart is beating.
No path, but rotate, expand, collapse.
No new view, no need for possession.
Nothing outside the Way of Heaven.
So give up this me and mine
Angst of name, fame, honour, like.
If the waves move through you
(Tides, tempests, zephyrs, whispers)
O Vessel of angels, defence of demons,
Inventor of nothing, commentator of mages,
Speak, write, shout, breathe.

Eyes that have seen everything
And forgotten,
Put it back
In our hearts –
The spark, the ember.
Every one of us-
A hearth of the sacred fire,
Never extinguished,
Ever-present light.
One of millions.
Small stars scattered,
Photons of cellular thought
There to glimmer eternally.

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Night Watch

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 13, 2012| 2 Comments »

Night Watch

We shall learn to suffer the long dark,
Learn to melt with the short darkness.
As clouds cover the stars,
As the fire settles back
And the cats, relaxed, alert
Become still
( now it is their world).

The hum of voices, insistent, distracting, withdraws,
An undertow sucked into silence
(The spaces between things).

Roaming large and small:
The solid fears and frights,
Noises with eyes,
Snarl of unknowingness.
(Keep still.)

It is the edges that melt away
The words no longer mine.
The certainties belong to naive daylight
Not to this red tongue of dark beauty
Lapping synapses with galactic spin.

Enough to be breathing in and out
Enough to be watchful as sleepers sleep
Enough to shift weight slightly as the heavens wheel
Enough to know little, if nothing at all,
To rest upon the pulse and flow of veins
The warmth of cell and muscle
The opium castles of consciousness
(emperor’s clothes on a ghost of habit).

Keep dark the hours of darkness
Keep silence in the silent wanderings
The silent wings, the silent edges,
As silence is the only way,
The one sure way,
To find what becomes the centre.

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Withering

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 12, 2012| 3 Comments »

Withering
Back to the bone.

Then, too,
The marrow
Drawing in.

Cease, surcease,
Silence.

Thread of life
Pulled tight,
Stretched taught.

Knotted, (dark knot),
To the past
Hoping to continue
Through this cold.

Even water, though,
Has turned
To rock.

Only one movement :
Slow,
Pendulum moon
Slides golden,
Hazy
Across
This winter dawn.

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Reflections On Water

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 13, 2012| 9 Comments »

We recently travelled to the Isle of Skye and the Western Highlands of Scotland. October in Scotland is glorious and the weather was good – not too overcast, not too sunny – so that we were able to see the land in many of its moods and atmospheres. I have selected a few images around the subject of water. I hope you enjoy the visual essay.

Taken from a cafe window in Portree, Skye, early morning looking east.

 

Fron Ord, Sleat, Isle of Skye, looking across Loch Eishort towards the Black Cuillins.

 

Clouds reflecting in the still waters of a loch an near Kilt Rock, Trotternish, Skye.

 

 

Looking across the sea to Harris from Duntulm, Trotternish, Skye.

 

 

Ripples on Loch Bay, Waternish, Skye.

 

 

Dawn sky over Kyleakin, Skye. The view from our bedroom window.

 

 

Sunrise over Kyleakin, Skye. Waves of light.

 

 

Early morning mists lift into the sky over Glen Garry.

 

Mists, shadows, trees, Glen Garry.

 

 

Still waters, slow moving mists. Loch Lochy.

 

Sunlight enters the woods. Mist rises from the waters. Loch Lochy.

 

 

Water-worn pools, Falls of Killin.

 

 

Waterside willows, Loch Venachar.

 

 

The sky below. Loch Venachar.

 

 

The Waters of the World. Loch Venachar.

——

This world

is the Otherworld:

Silver and gold

in turns.

The road flies

to the horizons

where our eyes linger,

longing

for something

right

in front

of

us.

 

———

 

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An Infection of the Bards

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 9, 2012| 6 Comments »

could I carry
The words of aonghus macneacail
Safely in my head,
A basket of eloquence,
Then my own tongue
(And its roaming spirit)
Would never be silenced.

And my eye would be
Hard as nails, soft
As sea foam
Seeing all, feeling all
In sounds
Round and slap flat,
Like a bodhrain
Of the heart.

Wave-formed sound
Of how it is,
How it may be,
How it was –
A weaving of Time
And Space,
A knotting of nets
To catch the fast, glistening shoals
Of verse,
Clever creel to hold safe
All those
Camoflaged, scuttling notions.

For they are there
When I am in drought,
(lips cracked, tongue
Cleaved to mouth’s ceiling),
Angus, and Sorley, too:
Like sudden, hidden
mellifluous streams
Stumbled across
On the deserted, bleak
Black moors,
bringing fountains of words
Tumbling,
Roaring
For an hour or two
Until subdued
In bog and slough
Or drowned,
quenched,
Tumbling
Over the cliffside
To be lost
In the hidden rivers
Of the sea.

——-

(On a recent trip to the Isle of Skye I bought a copy of Aonghas MacNeacail’s new volume “Laughing at the clock” in Portree.
I have, there and since, been working on a poetic piece in many parts concerning the passage of Time, landscape, life, death, the secret commonwealth of the Sidhe, inspiration, Independance, freedom…..
It is not the usual way I work – a careful fishing for lines, a tentative accumulation of images, and the whole edifice rises and sinks over time like a mythical island. But when I think I have exhausted its potential, or become distracted by daily events, all I need to do is to open up a page of Aonghus’s, or of Sorley Maclean and then my head is filled with a flurry of muse’s feathers ( coming or going), which, if I am fortunate in giving the time to put down the phrases and ideas, can fuel many things.
Language is indeed a virus, it seems. And I am happy not to be innoculated…..)

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A Poet’s Epitaph

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 6, 2012| 1 Comment »

 

 

To be remembered

 

For a few sweet words only

 

Would suffice, I think.

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Cold Flame

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 5, 2012| 1 Comment »

Cold flame
Crisping leaves:
Autumn stars’
Distant roaring.

Time,
Weightless,
Escapes
Into the endless
Night.

Adrift,
We revolve slowly,
Catching sight
Ocassionally
Of where we
Have been….

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All Saint’s Eve (and the Changing of the Clocks)

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 29, 2012| 2 Comments »

—
This flimsy, delicate swish of hour’s numbers
Does nothing to still the tide
Of growing diminishment.
Daylight shrinks still
From either end
Of the dawn
and the dusk.
No use blinking,
No use turning back
or away.
The dark is rolling,
Storming down the hills;
The shadows creeping up the valleys;
The dead stirring, wakening,
Thinking about walking abroad,
Stretching thin and between the worlds…
The slender will turn gaunt,
The well-fed, complain.
In the thin rain, in the slicing blast
The candles will all falter, wan:
Light is a force
That fights the splintering months,
Of which we have too little
And none
To see
in this world
For an age yet….

afternoon skies: maples,wind and Beinn na Caillich, Skye

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Autumnal Kennings

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 10, 2012| 1 Comment »

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—–

Susurration of forests.
Encyclopedia of fire.
Elongation of shadows.
Collapse of fragilities.

Bejewelment of cobwebs.
Sharpening of edges.
Exhalation of fruits.
Confluence of grey waters.

Concatenation of stormclouds.
Re-examination of necessity.
Emptying into silence.
Separation of birdsong.

Stillness of distance.
Blossoming of starlight.
Hymnal of mists.
Recollection of mortalities.

Apparition of conciliation.
Pibroch of endings.
Acquirement of talons.

A roar of horizons.
A wonder of the Almighty.
A retreat of the insubstantial.
A shattering of prognistication.
A scattering of gold.

Dominion of ravens.
Cold iron pot of despair.
Return of darkness.
Return of returning.

———

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(the images are my drawings taken from Iron Age coin art. The upper shows druid/deity/chieftain/warrior holding torc of power. Naked in truth, staring into the world, framed by long braided hair or head cloaked to see into other places…
The lower, a female queen/warrior/goddess singing her power. Head full of animals, voice travelling to the four quarters..

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