Posted in Uncategorized, tagged forest, landscape, landscape photography, light, midsummer, Poetry, stars, summer, Wales on June 12, 2016| Leave a Comment »
CANOL HAF
(Midsummer)
a cowslip sky
above butter mountain.
the white waters whisper-
no rain for a week now.
the summer stars i have all renamed
and are become dear places i have loved.
and the faces that float smiling
as i sleep, shine warm as sunlight
in bee-blessed gardens.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, black and white, drawing, landscape, mind, multitudes, nature, night, plenitude, Poetry, presence, printmaking, stars, thoughts, world on October 7, 2015| Leave a Comment »
And is it not true,
Waiting a while in darkness
There blooms a sky
Once blank
Now full more and
More of stars?
And so, too,
in silence waiting
We see thoughts roar and multiply,
Emotions self-arise, endlessly,
and, fecund, roll
To oblivion.
It happens without effort,
This stretching, purring cat close by,
These hillsides echoing
With wild cries of foxes.
This air, motionless, cool,
A taste wrapped in grass and woodsmoke.
Without edge,
Without distinction,
Mind fills up all space.
The world, a cup
Half empty of sorrow,
Is half full of joy.
Yet we thirst
And must drink
Regardless.
Gulping life,
A taste to keep us,
A withstanding
of emptiness.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, awareness, book of voices, clarity, consciousness, dawn, dream stream, first day, icon, inner/outer voices, magical reality, night, patterns, Poetry, print, seven days, sky, stars on April 12, 2015| 2 Comments »
Book of Voices (This Sky: part 1)
Let us say: this sky, as pink certainly as warmed skin.
This, an indefinite and infinite blue, as those eyes.
And as close,and as distant, as God.
Let us say: there will be again,as ever,one voice that begins,
A clarion clear and moon-bright,
One stirring uttered echoing on the valley flank
Or deep on the sacred golden wood,
Cloutie-hung with shredded prayers,
(Shellac shined black ink careful lines on white silk,
Vehement, scratched curses on lead, tight folded,
Hidden in crack and crevice, utterance to vengeful ones
To do it, do it for me).
A shower of seasons tattered reasons,
Shattered, smattered, sculpted, howled to mothers
( hungry and cold in the dark, glint of light
And voice whispered behind the holy door).
Like this, almost exactly: one clear star
Glinted, marked out, a definite oneness,
A line, a shaft, a rope to upness and downness,
Dimensional isness, a road to stick to.
But as eye accustoms to deeper delved
And shrinking edge of silence:
One more there, and another, and so another
Until the sky is dark with inescapable stars
Vying for eye and patterning the mind with yes
And yes, a plan, a map, a purpose, a chorus
Of foamed ejaculate, a tide ripped and roaring in
Upturning pebble feather flotsam bone and tattered weed
( a flap of iodine, a wriggle).
Let us say, this close to madness
Is this close to revelation.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, fireside, leaving, life, light, night, Poetry, quiet, returning, stars, Winter on January 17, 2015| Leave a Comment »
I have left a soft, small light
So as not to wake the ones I love.
Rising in the long and cold
Of frosts and dark morning..
Gone to kindle a new hearth,
To catch with tinder
The last left light,
To warm the space distant as holy.
A bloom, a bud pushed through,
A green something from soily ground.
I have left a soft small light,
Like all those others who have,
In their tumbling watching heavens,
So as to never lose place,
So as to one day, quietly slip back home,
Or at least, at very least, know for once
From whence we, longing, drifted,
Wandered, a dream untrenched,
Not dimmed by mornings.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, ascent of the soul, constellations, cosmologies, medieval iconography, photography, Poetry, star names, stars on July 16, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Spera octava – spera stellata
The circle of stars, a silvered scum, a foam, a detritus,
A flotsam of teleologies, nub-ends of endless parties,
A whispered recital from dust-gnawed cities.
Shall we savour their strangeness, the fruit of centuries?
A wish
The tomb
The roof
The old man.
The tent
Al Tard, the end.
The apes
The south gate
A pillar
The old folks.
The raven’s neck
The falling cross
The long sandbank
The wolf.
Al Kaid, the eggshells
The embracer
The green hill
The changer.
Kakkab Mulu-izi, the star-man of fire.
The magician
The golden well
The spectre’s head
The first frog.
Al baluh, the city.
The azure dragon
Crown of the forehead
The southern sea
Announcer of invasion on the border.
Narrow cloudy train of female stars
Golden cluck hen and her five sisters.
Temennu, the foundation stone
Al wasat, the central one
Saptar shayar, the seven anchorites
The white of the poplar tree.
San Tsze, three instructors
Antasurra, the upper sphere
Drag-blod, the fire tail.
Pivot of the planets
The nail
The bright one
Ishtar
Bethulah
The defenceless
The virgin’s girdle
The lady of heaven
Taygeta
Atrami
Segin
Aludra.
And so we fly past the whispering lights,
souls and stories,
wished-for and longings,
The indicators of time and movement,
a slightest of lost taste,
A melting of bright ice.
Silence returns.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, art, awareness, Callanish, essences, Isle of Lewis, Keys to the Green Kingdoms, landscape, night, Otherworlds, Poetry, Scotland, standing stones, stars, time on March 24, 2014| 1 Comment »
KEY TWO
(Stones of Callanish)
Starlight
Ripples outwards.
Past, present, future, sitting down
To feast at the same table.
The ancestors from whom we descend
Graciously remain;
Their old,wrinkled faces,
Their stone fingers,
Reveal the bones, extracting
Meat and marrow:
This is where eternity crystallises.
This is where soul, stone and star converse.
Procession of coincidence.
Listen:
The music of time.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Haiku, moon, night, oceans, Poetry, Ryokan, Sound, space, stars, whales on March 7, 2014| 2 Comments »
WEIGHTLESS
The whales weightless
In their heaven.
The spice islands of the night.
Drowned in
Midsummer blue
Scattered, sprinkled.
They sing across half a world:
These whales weightless
Rippled in starlight.
The golden moon is a song.
They shall sing the song
Of one line,
Of one world,
Of one note,
Endlessly satisfied.
The dark with its peacock eyes,
The bruised lips of the rose,
The scented fingers of night.
Wordless on the wings of fluid song
The curves they leap,
The sideways slide of their dream:
The stars that weave the hours.
Ryokan says:
Months pass, days pile up
Like one intoxicating dream-
An old man’s sighs.
One bowl
Is the moon.
One robe
Is the sky.
He says:
Dreaming about this dream world again
Old memories return.
Ten thousand mountain paths.
And they are weightless
In their blue heaven,
Stars, mountains,
Whales.
The spice of moonlight
Scented of roses.
Wordless they turn,
Sighing they turn,
Weightless, wordless:
These days piling up,
Endless paths, winged,
Sliding, drifting,
Weightless.
came across some old scribblings, upon which this piece was constructed
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged February, fire, hearth, landscape, morning, paths, Poetry, roads, sky crowns, stars, storm, the wanderer, Winter on February 4, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Four pieces from early this morning, ancestral mutters: sky crowns and words from the Anglo-Saxon.
SIGNIFICATOR
The whispers of the stars of dawn,
Rooted in deep paths, seated mind.
Mind that seeks names only,
Seeks genealogies, plumbs down fathoms,
The pitch of rightness.
To themselves they whisper,
Remembering the weave and twist of gold,
The movers in the shadows,
The movers of twilight,
The flickering torchlight,
The muffled, shuffled feet of steady procession,
Of circular dance taking up positions,
Constellations of mirrored geometries
Winding up time before babes yawn,
Before the aches of morning stretch and sigh.
Before the biting cold, the stirring of embered dawn.
Before has passed.
Before has misted away.
The whispered eloquence of now,
A tranquil moment turned and knotted,
A place remembered on a silent road:
Signpost, crossed paths, significator.
—-
FIRE PRAYER
I kneel, cold water,
Before the fire to kindle,
A prayer for light and warmth:
Cold water, flying cloud.
For spark and roaring:
Cold wave, cold tide.
For return of belonging,
For reason to remain.
—-
WANDERER
The lament of the dispossessed –
The long diminishing curlew.
The urgent, soft cries of lovers –
Wild geese, wild geese.
The road is a way but not a home.
The footsteps of others, small consolation
When they have vanished to the horizon,
Gone on before, singing the old song.
Cloud-cloaked wanderer tasting salt.
His children, weighed metre,
The lilt of left and right.
—
ACHE
Raked by claws
(This wolf cold).
Blood stain tumbling
Clear watered pools:
These clouds of squall
In dawn skies.
World’s ribs sigh
And shiver –
The ache
Of onwards.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ignited, infection of words, language, light, literature, morphic, mused., neural, night, Poetry, resonance, signs, Sound, sparked, stars on December 11, 2013| Leave a Comment »
In the library of the night
Seconds flick as pages scanned.
A gilded, bound and chained world
Reading, exploring, explaining itself.
An Alexandria, an akashic island,
Self-muttured, self-revealing,
A transliteration through dream.
And somehow
( there always seeming to be
No causes, always just strings of effect),
A simple phrase gongs and peals,
Bursting, a match in tinder,
A moment drawn dancing out,
A simmer of vocables,
A play of chord-thoughts.
One word becoming
A thousand languages,
A mandala, a point,
A pebble rippled
Surface
Where a glowing moon
Slides and steadies.
One word, one sky.
The view
From where you are,
Accidental muse.
—-
simonhlilly 