Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Powys’

This River

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 19, 2014| 7 Comments »

This river
Roaring pink
At sunset.

Drawing down
The woven laced waters,
Undressed the hills
Of their fast brightness.

The road rises,
Rises and rises again,
Shines towards a westing sun,
Winged, borne up.

At his black pulpit hedge
The upright larch,
Ragged golden zealot gesticulate.

He points the path
To John Penry’s home,
Who stirred the cauldron,
Pricked the fat yawning clergy,
Called for God’s word in Welsh
To gather the scattered, downstruck flock.

The old road rises west,
Towards heaven,
A herd of rainbows
Fed on distance,
Fed on sloped green,
And sapped colours
Of an evening fading fast.

It will never end,
Nor will it ever remain the same.
We shall all be woven in,
Embraced, where light
And rain dress pastures,
Where sheep, patient as saints,
Drift into starlight.
This ribboned road,
This river flood,
These veined
And holy oaks.
A consequence of notions.

—

Read Full Post »

December, Towards Solstice

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 17, 2014| 1 Comment »

December, Towards Solstice.

The silent sky opens upward
Right to the cold edges of space.
The ground sinks into the waters,
Its weight, another’s years folding.

Now is winter’s river:
Flowing fast and deep
Over all, through all,
Between fire and distance.

Hedgerows are neat and black,
Barns stacked full,
Land drains cleared
Of two months rotting leaves.

The long low light of day
Points to shadow’s reach
But cannot quench them.
It slides off hillsides,
Skims deep valleys.
It declines to matter.

—

Read Full Post »

Knife Moon

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 7, 2014| 2 Comments »

IMG_1214.JPG

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.

—-

IMG_1173.JPG

Read Full Post »

All Roads

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on November 3, 2014| 4 Comments »

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.

—

Read Full Post »

Cefn Gorwydd

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 20, 2014| Leave a Comment »

IMG_1183.JPG

Cefn Gorwydd ( pronounced something like ‘kev’n guroo eth’ ) is the hamlet where we now live. It is strung along a high ridge between two ranges of upland : old mountains- some of the oldest in the world- the Cambrians and the Eppynt, once home to druid saints and radical preachers…

CEFN GORWYDD

Here we all are, eight in a row
Sight pinned to one view.
Welcomed by distance
Absorbed, belonged, threaded in.
Suspended in swift airs,
Slowly turned, become diaphanous in thought.

Vague only to the roaring loggers
Mumbling down to valley woods,
Vague to the laboured city breath.
Worn thin and cherished
On the sight of light and land,
On the crisp edge and whispered mists.

Folded in and waiting.
The mountains’ round names
Seeping into stilled minds,
Burned purple, stained grey, rubbed in gold.
The layered edge a lilting song
A yearn for valleys curling north.

We are named, but little, a scattered thing
Tumbled together by this or that.
Laid out in a neat line
Patted down, a pattern of years.
We become monastic, an inward road.
Going and returning slow step by step
Between a fuller season
And a perfect prayer.

—

IMG_1179.JPG

Read Full Post »

Little Llangammarch

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 1, 2014| 8 Comments »

LITTLE LLANGAMMARCH

Little Llangammarch under wood and under hill.
Not quite awake, not quite asleep,
Dreaming as leaves drift down.
One road, more or less, one shop, one bar, one hall,
A church, a chapel or two.
Time each day measured by two trains north, two trains south.

Toes wriggling always in Irfon and Cammarch,
(Where the two are met and knitted, a feathered mating).
Root or rock, I cannot say for sure.
This stone sheds syllables in flakes,
Prayers slurred, folded, forgot.
This root, iron red, waves wrapped,
Unworn, unmoved, on the hill above,
A saint’s house, stilled glory, skybound.

The swoop and quiver of the red kite’s call.
Shade-huddled sheep, the quiet of the field.
The past it grows thinner by the year
Lost for words, the long losing of names,
The who and where, the why weeded over,
The hero’s house, a longed-for truth
Scattered in byre and farmyard.

Between the open-eyed houses
and the river, still and low as glass,
Come tumbling flocks from the fields,
Down between the cars a bleating tide,
Chivvied, the bobbing, weaving dogs behind.

It hovers: the mountain silence.
They come and go of their own accord,
Leaving clouds and mist for a while, for a while,
Between what is left unsaid
And the slow rain.

Here below, where woodpeckers cling statuesque
and jackdaws skid and race
Like kids in playgrounds, cops and robbers,
Shootout at noon.
Here, in the fields again
The sheep wander as numerous as stars and as white.
The wind blows colour and light,
To and from the bluffs of Abergwesyn.
The rolling darkness, the quiet night descending
From the deep well of Cwm Graig Ddu.

—

Read Full Post »

The Road to Llyn Brianne

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 25, 2014| 4 Comments »

THE ROAD TO LLYN BRIANNE

There are,
There upon the turning road,
Great stones that watch
Without eyes,
Deep gullies with secrets
But no guilt,
A green, lined knotting,
A measurement of altitudes,
A satisfaction of soughing,
Where the treetops pin cloud
And the loud, round thin
Cry of hawks
And the surprising gorse
And the dusty heather.

At this height
The still, silent, drowning waters
Are steel half polished,
The vowels of ice and aeons
Carved into old valleys
And the grey, cracked rocks
Peer out shaping wind and runnel,
A shelter for moss
And little things hardly cared for.

They are persistently hopeful:
These lone fishers for gold,
Generators purring
Sifting the blood of old mountains,
The dust of suns.

And the sheep
Nonchalent as philosophers,
And the swoop of druid crows
On the diving road,
Where distance is down.
The world curved
And marvellous.

Crisp, cusped,
Drunk on vast views,
Descending at last,
A road less laboured
Between blanketed green,
Behedged, somewhat planned,
The roll into town,
A reassertion of time
Into space.

Read Full Post »

The Yews of Abergwesyn

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 30, 2014| 4 Comments »

LLANHIFANGEL ABERGWESYN

IMG_1079.JPG

Heather, royally purple, clothing the hillsides above.
Around the circles of Llanhifangel Abergwesyn,
The silver, sanding shores of Irfon, curved and rippled.

Sheltered from sheep, this round silent shield
Is where they are gathered, where they are splintered,
Where they are woven.

United, divided, leaning into the storms of Time.
Hausers swinging between centuries
Binding sun and earth, to heaven, even.

Knitted light revolved and spun,
Wheels in wheels, a thousand eyes
Open and closing, a blink of orbital rhythm.

These trees, these towers, these castles roaring upwards.
Ladders of chant and silence,
Spilt shade.

Bow ye down,
Bow ye graceful between the gravestones,
Flaked and moss green.

Bone and mind incorporate,
Reawoke, voiceless and benign
In speckled sunlight, sublime.

—

IMG_1077.JPG

Read Full Post »

Yews of Llywel

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 27, 2014| 11 Comments »

IMG_1048.JPG

YEWS OF LLYWEL

1
Older than theologies,
Blood grail holder
A taste of cinnamon and rust.
He would have stood here shaded,
Llywel, eyes following your dark spirals,
Hands and back against your rough dragon skin,
Watching the rain sweep in across the valley trees.
The little stream growing loud then quiet again,
The nod of measowsweet and hawkweed,
A thick, potent prayer tasting on his lips.

IMG_1051.JPG

2
Lidless, you seeing yews,
Eyes fast on eternity,
Shrugging off days and years.
Time, (even), kneels down in your shade
Forgetting all but this one moment,
Head bowed, long-veined hands
Like the valleys of the Epynt,
River full and throbbing green,
Bending seawards, bending to the lowlands,
Bending to the silence, to the confluence of breath,
An instant of clarity, wordless, bubbled, weightless.
The chambered heart, rope and sinew,
Knotted, released, a stretched tympanum quivering.
One vowel, one consonant, one tree.

IMG_1050.JPG

3
My tongue a rolling mist,
A down feather aimless,
Unable to approach nearer
The in and out of your mighty, inexorable breath.
Time’s golden apples fall ripe and fall rotten,
Lapsed thought imcomprehensible.
A simple vastness, single, resounding,
A parliament of photons.
Woven thickly, red, hard, etched water.
A held swirl, thirled moments,
Nailed, transfigured, an apotheosis
Beyond good or bad, beyond purpose,
Beyond meaning,
An etymology of divinity.

IMG_1053.JPG

Read Full Post »

A Taller Silence

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on August 21, 2014| 6 Comments »

We are living now in a taller silence.
Settled down to a rhythm of hymnals,
Level with the swallow’s breast.
On the edge of long valleys winding northwards
Where the skies divide and clouds battalion,
(The sheep-cleared highlands where ghosted soldiers thunder).

Grey walled are the lichened churches, hunched and hummocked,
Grey walled the farms, grey walled the cwms,
Silver and green the streams under grey spanned arches.

Time turning back to itself, not a straight but a winding road.
Time, as patient as a ripening sloe, taking hues from each twilight.
Time measured in the names of saints, in their prayers and footsteps.

We are living now in subtler skies, rhymed, alliterate, nuanced.
Between threaded rivers: alder-toed Dulas among the sedge grass;
Oak-vaulted Irfon where Llewellyn stumbled never to rise again;
The Bran, the Gwyddon, the Cledan, the Cammarch,
All matched by the paths of stars in the tall, silent night.

The rain sweeps colour from the distance now,
The sun blesses this and then that field with light.
Hills melt and reappear, the ashes sway in a westerly wind.
We settle deeper yet and become still, edged with moments,
Wrapped and whispered, between the syncopated grazings of sheep.

—

IMG_1021.JPG

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »