At the very edge there, where words are born
In the roar of the world, and waves roll in on black cracked cliffs
That will only slowly yield to any future dreaming.
There is a tree there, they say, that holds four seasons at once
In its salty grasp, and dawn and sunset, and fire and fountain.
Flowers and fruit: from silver, moon-pale bells,
To orange suns, red shifting to dying stars,
Leaves ever green and growing on skin-warm branches.
And they say the first children of the greatest mother,
When they flew over the empty land, green below them and open to all.
They who walk through deepest earth, white as the threads
That hold the flow of Time, red as capillaries, life-blood pulsing there.
They scattered the seeds of that sea-worn, time-shaped tree
In the forests there, in the folded valley’s shade.
As a sign that Time is not eternal prison,
That a river is both estuary and source,
The great and the small – one remembered day.
That passing is a dream.
That there, in the deepest heart,
The birds of dawn and sunset simultaneously sing.
The dying of every season’s wish,
the bloom of cold, the sun’s warm song,
Nothing but life’s long breath as she dreams her dream,
Turns and sighs and does not wake.
On the plain there, unshaded, unsullied,
Encompassed, radiant, four seasons meeting, holding on, letting go.
Delightful, distant memory song at cross-tides of seasons,
Watching stars explode, feeling dervish galaxies dancing tranced
To their maker, dark and glorious within their hearts.
There is the one spell the speaker spoke,
And it rumbles on through every dawn,
through every dying cry.
From beginning to end,
An eternal tree that carries all seasons there.
–
One of the poems recently written with the local Eisteddfod in mind.
simonhlilly 