Posted in Uncategorized, tagged consciousness, landscape, language, nature, perspective, Poetry, rivers, Wales on April 26, 2022| Leave a Comment »
RIVER WORDS
They do not say
What they sing
For your listening
But for their own joy.
No will of their own
But to find the deepest
And return.
Where streams meet:
A birth of spirals.
By the bridge
The patterns hold steady.
Acquiescence to the way.
We think we know them
By their names we know them.
We know them by their names.
You name the river
‘Destroyer of the children of men’.
I name this river
‘Gentle mother of fields’
The river calls itself:
‘Longing for stillness
In the deep’.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Abergwesyn, art, landscape, landscape photography, Mid Wales, Poetry, rivers on December 17, 2016| 1 Comment »
The long song
1
Pwll Bo, where the waters swirl the colour of trout,
As brown as deep sunlight and the taste of peat.
Shadowed is the heathered hue ( whose voice
White as lightning sings to the oldest of things,
Though few may know it except the ghosts
Of wanderers lost and found by starlight,
And the fastness of owl-bright silence
And the stillness of hills in their watchfulness.)
Pwll Bo and then the Washpool and then on,
Down to the church and then the town.
Everything murmurs in its own language.
The river’s accent rushes from wild to soothing
To wild again.
Clouded, the eye of this precinct night
Lost in dream that seems to be remembrance, but is not.
A doppler drift of slow, utterly endless forgetting.
2
Singing the long song
Pwll Bo roars white and whispers.
Water turning hills to soil.
3
Pwll Bo
Spirit song
Mountains to soil
Sunlight to trees
Water to life.
Weaving sound
A throat of rock.
White, roaring water.
Hollowed rock
A mouth of song.
Thunder whispers.
Sunlight and shade.
A rivered voice.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged altitude, belonging, hills, landscape, new home, photography, Poetry, Powys, rivers, uplands, Wales, weather 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.
—
simonhlilly 