TWO DISTANT MOMENTS
.
I breathe the cool cloud
The jackdaws lean into.
The spice of wet grass.
A radiant moment dissolves into eternity.
.
Evening turns to rust.
The blue hills bloom cloud.
Soft, this beautiful melancholy.
.
Posts Tagged ‘silence’
Two Distant Moments
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Autumn, Haiku-ish, landscape, landscape photography, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, Poetry, silence, the numinous, time, Wales, weather on February 8, 2021| Leave a Comment »
There, The Stillness Sings
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Cambrian Mountains, dawn, landscape, Poetry, silence, summer, the numinous, time, Wales on September 21, 2020| 2 Comments »
THERE, THE STILLNESS SINGS
sink down a little, beneath these surfaces.
the same world, a different view.
a cool wind is blowing, though the mists stay still.
the deep hills in the north, the uplands of the south
are nowhere to be seen.
in the garden scented rose petals drop like rain.
sink down and find the earth,
a rich soil of dreaming.
my souls have coalesced
but drift apart as stars do,
As wandering flocks do.
without even trying
the hills begin to emerge.
it will be a hot day
and we shall be grateful for shade.
—
Epynt Songs
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged abandonment, ancestors, art, belonging, death, eviction., history, landscape, landscape photography, Poetry, silence, song, the dead, time, Wales, Welsh language, Y’r Epynt on September 10, 2020| Leave a Comment »
WAR HAS CAST THEM
War has cast them off the mountain
And they have never yet returned
Except their tattered ghosts minding flocks
And the wind and the rain and the ravens.
The stone, green under soil.
The soil, black under sedge.
The distance sailing above cloud
Shaped by worlds beyond reach,
Reciting the names, reciting the names.
—
SOME GO
They weave these times of plague
with threads of brighter days.
Sharing the names of farms and families:
Nain, hen nain, hen hen nain,
and the tales of the tales she told.
The hearths swept and re-laid
for an eventual return
after the storms of the world blow by;
the family bible left open at Lamentations.
Some go into the hills,
finding the silent walls
moss green, wide strewn;
the signs all but lost,
like the songs of living and dying:
the songs of harvest, the songs of planting,
the songs of weaving, the songs of lamenting,
the songs of losing and of finding.
It is the songs of living
that we have lost forever;
the songs of simple doing
that told us we were not alone
in feeling the rhythms of breath
as muscles worked and tasks completed.
It is all silent in the hills now.
cloud and curlew,
raven and lark.
Memories fade
as the farmhouse walls
tumble under moss.
Hold on to the names,
the farms, the families,
the cherished dead.
Over their heads
the world changes.
Plague days,
words dying.
—
The Epynt is an area of high uplands between the Brecon Beacons and the Cambrian Mountains in Mid Wales. A strong, rural, Welsh speaking area, the Epynt was cleared of people at the start of the Second World War so that the land could become an artillery training area. Eighty farms were given a few months to pack up and leave, breaking and dispersing a robust culture to find their own way miles away from their homes. After eighty years the land is still possessed by the government and this year many descendents have got together to remember their families, where they lived, where they moved, who remembers tales of the old days.
Raag Megh
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Autumn, dhrupad, Indian Classical music, landscape, landscape photography, morning, music, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, pentatonic, Poetry, raag megh, rain, rain melody, seasons, silence, time, words on September 3, 2020| Leave a Comment »
RAAG MEGH
find the
slow rituals
that absorb time and space.
.
there is
no hurry,
words vanish, yet
last forever, somehow.
.
the green, warm rains
as soothing as music, fill
the breathing valley.
.
one step
is all it takes
to start a dance
no-one has seen before.
.
we will, for sure,
be swept up in
sadness and joy.
.
we will, for sure,
be persuaded that beauty
is just not enough.
.
slow air pushes
the thin rope of smoke
to and fro by the window.
veils of rain hide the hills.
.
it is green and cool and lovely,
the trees say.
look at our slow dance,
they say.
.
and let go
their tired leaves.
–
Raag megh is a pentatonic raag (raga) played during the rainy season, but because of its cooling, calming influence is also played at any time and circumstance. i used it as the name of this poem as it seemed to fit its atmosphere and mood. Check out raag megh on youtube, especially those by ustad rashid khan, pandit jasraj and kushal dass.
Plague Days
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged consciousness, plague, Poetry, quarantine, silence, the world on March 24, 2020| 1 Comment »
PLAGUE DAYS
The silence grows with the lengthening days.
We may yet learn how to breath in
And how to breath out with simple joy.
We may yet sit still and listen to birdsong,
Settling into the world we almost lost,
And now have the chance to find within us,
As it has always been, as it has always been.
—
The Cloud
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, landscape, language, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, nature, Poetry, silence, Wales on February 2, 2020| 1 Comment »
THE CLOUD
The cloud is on the hill.
Words will come.
What the stark trees say.
What the rivers say.
A wood pigeon
welcomes the warm rain.
I have been away,
but returned to this silence
where the words are old
and make themselves.
—
Sing Out
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, chain of beings, creation, food, hymns, music, photography, Poetry, praise, purpose, silence, sustenance, tradition on March 24, 2018| 5 Comments »
SING OUT
Singing hymns to emptiness
Sound disappears with meaning
The instant it leaves the mouth
We need gods to sing to,
Something of the familiar,
But made more important,
As if worms and weeds
Had not silently shaped
All we are and will be.
It is what rivers and stars do,
It is what sheep and birds do,
Sing out to each other
That thin, frail line between
Life and death and life again.
Greedy gods and good gods
One by one supplanted
Though their lives are aeons.
Fed by song, happy in their given shapes
Until the singing stops
Where they forget their names,
Hatch as butterflies hungry for nectar.
There are the great and there are the small
While the song is sound and silence.
The void: a pause between movements
Where the audience wonders if it should clap
But remains in stillness, held within
A lovely diminishing resonance.
—
Midsummer Light
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ambience, art, Beulah, green, june, landscape photography, light, midsummer, Poetry, silence, twilight, Wales, woods on June 27, 2017| Leave a Comment »
MIDSUMMER LIGHT
The woods are settled now and full.
Their heavy green skirts spread cool
And pleated in each valley’s green lap.
Nest and nested, crowned with shade,
They glow of a midsummer evening
Into a slow, white bow of twilight
Patterned with bats and owls,
A stretched and quiet expanse,
The tropic and declination of invisible motion,
A singular silvered attendance upon silence.
—
Something to be said (Mayday)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Gwyn ap Nydd, haunted spaces, inspiration, language, may day, mayday, mond, myth, Poetry, reading, silence, song, the gathering of souls, the numinous, voices, Wales, words on May 5, 2017| 1 Comment »
SOMETHING TO BE SAID (MAYDAY)
Pauses grow longer, a melancholy may soon creep in.
We cannot escape our own voices.
( “We rarely go out these days and visitors, though longed for,
are a great discomfort”).
It is a wild guilt that wants our words in other’s heads.
Always a nuisance and a pleasure
to be infected with poetry,
to admit the familiar voices, to see which one leads, this time, the hunt.
Gwyn ap Nydd collecting souls, the ghosts of words,
The white words, the vapoured words,
the haunted words – as poetry is.
‘White, Son of Mist’ – like the morning,
the first attempt at May, after a night of rain,
new in stillness and birdsong, mist on green land,
the ash trees still thinking about their coming fountains of flowers,
roots wriggled so deep in the past, and aching old.
The dunnock’s sweet descent.
It filters down as if spider webs
And gold dust – the flecks
Of memory and forgetting.
A city with loud inhabitants, unkind and strange.
A darkness punctuated with doors and reasons.
As if it didn’t matter, everything collapses.
The moment passes, the tongue gives up.
It cannot make the chords that the brain sings in,
Just one note at a time, syllable by.
There is something to be said for silence.
The way the mist in its own dreaming gravity
Slides along the slopes
And settles in the cwms.
The way it shifts space.
The way it delineates what is not itself.
With what would we fill these silences
Should all the voices stop?
—
The Elenydd
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Cambrian Mountains, distance, Elenydd, landscape photography, Poetry, silence, space, uplands, Wales on February 8, 2017| 2 Comments »
Sunlight and whispers,
Bright rolling silence.
There is no confusion here:
All things fall fearless
Against the movement
And the stillness
Of hours and their dust.
Footsteps all forgotten
(Puddle, pool, stream, river)
Nothing but the distance of the past
And the distance of the future
(And the skylark remembering both).
The diagonal slide of sun and moon and stars,
Tides of light and shade,
The constant abrasion of the wind.
It hardly breathes, so still it is
In its rising and falling distances.
The silent rolling hills of heaven.
These uplands spread out
Like God’s own hands
On the first Sunday,
Sun-warmed skin stretched pale
Over rippled knuckles,
Bone resting quiet,
Muscle and tendon singing.
Sky-touched, the first moments,
Cloud thoughts, the pale waving grasses,
This click of warming rock.
—-
The Elenydd is the old name for the central uplands of Mid Wales, known as the Cambrian Mountains. The southern border is effectively the Irfon Valley, where I live, though in actual fact the valley is bordered on its other edge by the Mynnedd Epynt, a very similar landscape.
The Elenydd is a very ancient mountain range worn down to a high bog and grassland plateau cut deeply by streams and rivers
simonhlilly 