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Posts Tagged ‘song’

How Still

How still
The lashes of your eyes
Searching words
How still

How long
The slow rise of your breath
Searching peace
How long

How fine
The enamelled morning
Blue, shadowed
How fine

How light
The dive of swallows
above buttercup shine
How light

How still, how long
How fine, how light,
This filigree life
Floating skywards

Well, a thanks to Marie Marshall, whose words this morning fed this little thing, sort of summing up the morning sun here, before the clouds pile up and wind carries in rain… ( if I can put in a link to the original I will, not that it’s difficult but I am all at sea with invisible machinery).

fragment 354

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CHERISHING THE LONESOME

How is it that some songs come to fill us, define us, sum it all up, whilst others do not hold any heart for us? This morning the lines rose up ( snow frazen on the roof, a still day, cold, settled), of themselves, dragging their constellated nets of memory and feeling.

Do we become shaped by them or do they so perfectly will what we are so as to become part of us, entirely? History and identity coming down to radio songs and the secret shared discoveries of this voice or that voice, this tune, these words, these crashing chords. A selection of identities by sound. Naked pathways, already becoming set, though still unnamed, an internal hollowing out of clay, a sculpting of attitudes, an adoption of stance and gesture, a constant attempt to find the heart of a secret name, a true name that can only be found on the tip of the tongue, the back of the brain, perhaps the soul, perhaps the first link, the line of memory: I am this. This I am.

The way we choose to lie in sleep. The ways we choose. A confederation of paradox, a constellation of time-worn sink-holes, (the familar caves echoing, passages dark and shadows distorting, amplifying trains of thought). This name we have, this shape, this song, so deeply owned it has absorbed, coloured, flavoured all else. They have become us because they were the same as us. Their dance, our dance. Their view, our view. It is not complicated. It is not important. ( the spider web at the window is important. The way the cloud layers pink then blue is important. The echoing crow calling from the ash tree is important).

This ripple of words, digging and sifting, this song, the chorus, this artfulness, is a spinning within silence. A constant attempt to turn and turn, to see one’s own back. Slapstick ( it’s behind you), and it will always be behind you, spine holding everything up, unseen, a coathanger for tomorrow.

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FILLED WITH BIRDS

Dawn glides in silence,
Settles
Crystallising
around purring cats,
(quiet watching eyes
filling each room).

This house:
A pebble set against
A river of wind.

Two days ago
The sun splashed spring,
A bright relaxing,
Filled with birds.
Now,
Winter has returned
To gnaw our bones.

Still, light is growing
At either end of day,
Stretched, though, and pale,
But welcome.

I am become an interweaving
Of days and moments,
A halting song
Made poignant
By strange harmony,
An old song
With new words
And a new tune.

Days
Filled with birds.
Nights,
Dream-filled,
Word-filled.
A pebble set
Against
A river of time.

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moss cave

11

The tasting of edges

Here is how it is,
How it was:
From the vastness of sleep
A coagulation, a gravitation
Towards the poignant edge.
The bliss of voiceless silence
Shaped and constrained:
Electrical motion, remembering, defining
The surge of emotion, the
Tumble of language, the assertion
Of primacy, constraint, neural nets
To catch and take hold, own,
Possess, reject, disown, demean.

The walls of this house,
Our house,
Sure against the gale,
Black and warmed.

Here’s the truth of it:
This language is not my own,
Not my words, not my syntax,
Not my thoughts, nothing new.
History: the reiteration
Of the forgotten blood
Still roaring changeless
Down the rivers of the years.

Here we are:
Rooted, belonging,
Our right,
A place to return to,
Warm in the soot-blackened darkness
(The winds screaming, battering, squeezing
Sound from tumbling dust).

A silver flash on the black waters,
Leaping fish way beyond the heron’s gaze.
The tawny glen, its tawny sides
Closing in as day’s end darkens.
Where are the fires?
Where are the voices?
The footsteps of those returning home,
The yawns of babes
Turning in belly-filled sleep?

The roaring tide has left.
Its sound diminishes.
The white, wheeling gulls
Are silent specks, the dark horizon.

We are left at a peace
We do not want,
Wordless sorrow for the misplaced.

I’ll tell you of the purest emotion,
Feeling that is free of judging,
Free of qualification.
It is the only language of the heart.
Music, the language without definition,
The summoning of tears and smiles,
Our greatest blessing to the universe.
A song, wordless and unequivocal,
A language universal, sublime,
Fearful, shaking the roots of things,
A net for the Almighty’s scatterings.

(I would barely trust one
Who could not find a tune
With nimble fingers,
Who could not speak verse
As if it were his own heart talking,
Whose words stay cowled behind
Heavy drapes of seemly logic,
Whilst inward, seethes and rails
Against opinion not his own.)

It is not here
In the dream of standing alone.
It is not here
In the upright light of independence.
Uprooted, it is not possible to find a place,
Poor and worthless, it is not possible
To find gold or glory.
It is the same voice
As it ever was:
The clever words well-weighted,
Reasonable.

The rain on the roof,
The wind at the door.
We huddle
Holding the weaving of stories,
The paths telling how we got here,
The choices, the turns, the betrayals.
Cold draughts sweep abandoned corners.

The water does not fight the rock,
It tunes its song and flows around.
It is neither this nor that.
The stepping stones in the flood –
Not the only way to cross.

This house of trees –
It is a house of despair,
A house of howling winds.

This house of trees –
It is a bounty of bright life,
A re-population of delight.

This house of trees –
It is a signal to all
The tyranny of the past has fled.

This house of trees –
It is a plight of bitterness,
An empty, starved gesture of despair.

Delight and despair –
Sunlight and shadows on the hills.
Holding firm is not the way of life.
Freedom and independence, not
A way to understand life.
The making of edges
Is the sound and silence of the tune,
A convolution of anticipation.

Each edge, though,
Neither this, neither that.
We define too closely,
Barter truth for surety
Miss the paradox,
Hold too tightly.

The bright edge is a sword
That severs as the sunlight is a sword
That blinds the sight.

Coming over the hill –
The sharp curtain of the Cuillins,
The still waters of Ord.

Belonging or not belonging:
I borrow my breath
From the exhalation of sparrows
I borrow my sight
From the sparkle of waterfalls
I borrow my heart
From the song of dust and worm
I borrow my words
From the whispers of the dead,
From MacLeod under the sky,
From the white bones, the bleached bones.

I am nothing
But a continuance
Nothing but a path
Made by those gone on before
A house of trees
A house of birdsong
A house of utterance
A forever
Dreaming of a walled instant
Of peace.

BlackCuillins Ord

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Loch Dunvegan2

10

Taladh na mna Sidhe, (The Fairy’s Lullaby)

She came as a whisper
From her own fair folk,
Over the bridge between worlds.
Called by the cries
Of the one forgotten, forlorn.

A shining face above the cradle,
Cold long feet upon the floor.
Golden as a graceful willow
In winter time on Camalaig Bay,
Silver as moonlight
On the flanks of Beinn na Creiche.

To hold and cradle
One small dreamer
Disturbed by the silence of a room,
The merriment of the hall.
The world found cold, empty
Wrapped once more in love
And soft singing:

Look, my child,
Fine limbed, small brightness,
Lithe and graced with all.
My dream eye
Sees the same one
A master amongst stallions,
Strong grasp, clear calling,
A glory of lordship
In the morning, laughing.

On the mountain,
Amongst the grass-warm breath
Of the peaceful kine,
A gatherer of silk milk,
Dressed in forest, dressed in snow,
Dressed in pasture sweet,
You my child, a habitation
Of delight.

The distant chink of harness
Shining in the setting sun
Leading your people
Harvest-home,
The chattering of women-folk,
The earnest sower.

You, who shall remember
The tenderness herein:
The warm womb,
The gift of my breast,
The throne of my knee.
Satisfied, content
Nurtured by the honey
Of dear love.

My lithe one,
My red and white one,
My strong yew sapling,
Dark green and handsome.
My laughing one,
Nodding golden iris by the shore,
Bright alder and birch leaning graceful.
A whisper, a chatterer, a sparkling of joy.
Last year, you were a seed in warm darkness.
Now you will soon be leaping high,
Running with song about the house,
About the fields, under cloud and sunlight.

May you not be harmed,
May you not be wounded,
May you not be slain,
But grow old and grey,
Crag-browed and wise,
A sharp nose for deceit,
A sharp eye for openness.

Child of warrior from the cold North,
Child of shadows, melting, lilting.
An in and an out you have,
A strong turning hope for peace.
A warrior’s hand you have for the land
Of the father of your father,
The mother of your mother.

The babe asleep,
She turned and left.
Tune turning in the air,
A waivering of rushlight,
A scent of honey milk.
A mother melting back
Into the weave of dream.
Footsteps soft fading,
Soft fading.

wooded falls1

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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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Well,
I just started to put down a few ideas that have been floating around for a day or two and this came out! Its not supposed to be anything than a stream of notions and a seasoning of spleen.

A rant I suppose against the self-congratulatory busybody know -it- alls who have always plagued mankind with their cleverness.

A good argument is like a good wine – it doesn’t last for long before it begins to go off. Eloquence is not a sign of wisdom – its just a melody with a catchy tune that sticks in the brains of the listener. Wise words only indicate where wisdom once settled, not where it now dwells. History is the evolutionary struggle of stories. The past tells us what is going to happen next (again!). Language does constrain how the world is seen and understood……

Pythagoras and Empedocles were riddlers and poets, regarded as political and military assets, terrorists and subvertors of the State, depending on who was paying their bills at the time……

As soon as we learned to put our memories down on paper we began to forget the true tales of who we were and where we came from. Now we are relying on an invisible spirit world of waves and photons to keep all our memories and identities what shall we be in danger of losing?…..

Muttering like Issa, wandering like Wang Wei, Ranting like Blake… A roar of white noise…..A memorable fancy…

Demons of gravity, angels of disease.
The invisible
The unseen
As the hidden worlds of spirit.

A spell is
A song
With intention,
A formula for chemical
Reaction.

It pulls the invisible worlds
Of sound
Image and meaning,
Ciphers for understanding,
Weaving them
To urgent eloquence.

A new faith invents
A new vocabulary
Of damnation.

Truths become lies,
Angels become devils,
Natural becomes blasphemous.

In the construction of Christ-
Saviour of the Empire,
Slayer for Peace
(the peace of bureaucrats),
music and dance died.

To define the new as new,
The old is damned.

Song, dance, smiling, drumbeat –
The offering of exuberant energy
As a sacrifice to feed life,
Becomes anathema.
There can be no more priestesses
Wild with drums and wine and rattles
No more pipes in the fields,
No more whispered prayers
To the herbs of healing.

Authorised, sanitised, regulated
Prescribed,
This is now
That,

Now we have found it:
The one formula
Of existence,
The equation of righteous power,
The excuse we have been looking for
To topple the walls
To break the chains
And reforge them in
A bright- edged delineation
Of certainty.
A sanitary prison.

Such was ever the past,
Ever the present,
Ever the future.
The invisible spirit
Resolves under machines
Of magnification-
No more than worms
And waves,
Fields and flux,
Sparks and shadows.

Because the language of mathematics
Can be demonstrated at every level
Of Creation,
The Universe is based on
Mathematical structures. All simply
Equations, no need for souls,
No need for mystery.

yeah! Right!
Can anyone spot
An error of logic here?
When will the fierce laughs
Of ridicule wake these
Small creatures….

The arrogant fantasists
Dwelling in the temples
Of nuclear power,
The myopic academic
Backslappers,
Patronising intellects,
Waspish with jargon.
Doctors of dust and death:

Your stories are the stories
Of the old priests
New-dressed in pious fashion
For the amnesiac, somnolescent
Herd.

Your pronouncements:
Equal to the ravings
Of acid-tongued
Loathers of life,
Chastisers,
Dust mouthed prophets,
Desert thugs of dogma…….

Ancestral bacteria
Dwelling nonchalently
Along with us still.
Unconcerned
With our new definition,
With pushed boundaries,
With enlightened approaches,
With educated guesses.

Warming their hands,
Blooming, flowering
A cultured approach to living.

And beyond them
Their own ghosts,
Wisps of virus,
Memory of hunger,
Longing to remain.

Beyond them,
Small whispers of death,
Prions
Insistent angel messengers….

The old sages,
Disruputable, shaggy browed,
Retired civil-servants,
Disgusted, tired, exasperated,
Leaving the towns
For the silent mountains-
They saw
The return of the swallows,
The lascivious tongues
Gulping in green light on
Every branch,

Ten thousand things
Collapsing to dust
And reforming on the
Warm breezes of Spring.

They spoke in riddles
In song
In poetry
In the truth of paradox,
In the light, sparkle-eyed humour
Of the clear souled.

There was a beginning
There was a beginning of a beginning
There was an anteriority
Of the beginning before the beginning.
There was an anteriority
Before that anteriority……

This is not a new song
This is not a new song
This is not a new song.

This is an old song
With new words
And a new tune.

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Yew notes

If you are drowning in the depths of winter, if you find the dark days dismal, if you are wearied by the woes of the world, if you find that you have lost your direction, lost your spark – then place yourself next to the banked-up fire of the yew tree spirit. Its constant energy and life- force will warm you through and help restore your core strengths and inspir new growth.
Yew is the oldest of trees, eternal, ever-living, vibrant wirh dragon-life, a great restorer and a great healer. Anchor you energies in the eternal silence of the yew tree and learn to sing again.

” I am Yew
Slow breath of Eternity
Joyful and profound

I am Yew
Well of Time
Source of Life.”

SONG OF THE YEW TEACHER

This is the song
Of the Yew Teacher,
The spiral snake,
The dragon healer.
Strong song and silent teacher.

Before the dawn
Before the first day
I knew the sun’s name
As it called me forth.

Pollen
Heavy,yellow
On the wind.

Red apple,
Sweet heart of death.

Green tongues and
life-blood fire.

Patient roaring,
Passion turning:

“come not with your mind
Nor your chatter.
Drown in me
Die in me
Join the centre:

The hub, the wheel,
The word,
The laughter.
The fire inside,
Concealed, concealing.

Wood and weather,
Warm and winter.

In my shadow,
Dance,
Dissolve.”

Past the sitting one who sees
Past the root into the chamber
Where the watchers weave and gather
Where the dragon’s breath is potent
Where the silver wheel is woven
Where the time is marked and measured
Where the space is held and hallowed

Where the land is named
And numbered.

” I am fire
And I am water.

I am earth
And I am ether”

This is the heart of Time,
The heart of matter,

The drum of centuries
The door
The silence…..

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How a language is written, how the sounds are turned to shape. What changes, what pathways are found and lost? Here we have English, painfully constructed step by step from left to right, from past to future, letter by separate letter, precise as bricklaying.

Does each language- tongue music- become more or less when it is understood? It stays art when the medium of sounds and the message of symbols somehow dance together. Otherwise it is in danger of becoming a servant to the mundane instruction.
Free of meaning it stays a sussuration of mind, sine wave and pattern in the white noise of the universe.

Arabic script is maybe one of the artistically fluent of language symbols. It reminds me of medieval musical notation, rise and fall of chant, images on a distant horizon, ripples on the surface of a stream……..

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Woke like Coleridge from the opium of sleep:
Flashes of glimmer
scales of colour
Slippery eels sinuous muscular lines of language
Lost in murky depths.

Sitting in dapples of sunlight.
Lost in the tree tops are the
Voices of doves,
Maybe angels
Or djinns
Blown in from the desert
Lonely,
After
So many endless years
Of pious
Rigid-backed denial –
The bitter tongues
Of the righteous.

So many pious years

In the dark cool cave before dawn:

Day by day
The moon is filling up
With tears.

Even with a thousand arms,
Kannon,
How shall you gather up
All the lost?

How encompass
All the bereft?

Things
Are moments
And cannot be prevented
From flying away.
Even the stars….

Even the stars.

This spring
Under the cherry blossom
Will gather the wan smiling ghosts
Once more.

We are dust
Held together by song.

Sing
Sing
Before the song is forgot.

The tongues of the djinn
Fading in daylight.
Muttering
Back to the cerebellum,
To practice cadence
And metre.

Voices in Arabic:
The wind as it dances and whips
Around tent wires and mast heads,
Aeolian harmony
Between knotted spirals
Dust devils
Sand patterns.
Well water
Cold night air
Crescent moon.

In Kuwait,
She said,
Every household
Had a musician,
Every one
A diver
For pearls
Of cool, iridescent
Beauty.
Oud in the shade of night fall……

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