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Posts Tagged ‘time’

VOYAGE OF BRAN (1)

For what reason

Does she call the Raven King,

Arcing over the waters to a safe land?

She is wedded to the song, blossom and fruit,

Calling from afar.

No matter where we turn

The music is invisible.

It sinks so deep that we sleep

And see what we cannot see,

Wish what we cannot know,

Set sail in hope on small boats,

Our lives no longer holding us

On their certain courses.

Cast adrift to find joy,

To measure it and move on

As the visions shift

And prophecies grow stronger.

We, in turn, become more, and less,

Floating above, sinking below.

The Raven sung by love to rest.

And restless shall they be

With and without this world.

The taste of the tree,

Never quite enough.

Never seen again,

Melting into the music.

Oh! Silver Branch!

VOYAGE OF BRAN 2

I turn back to see the future,

To see what has been missed.

A silver rent sings across the sky,

Laughter that only a world can make.

I know we dream, but do not know how to awaken,

Or if it is wise.

Water birds are screaming lies,

Hearts sink deeper into permafrost.

The smudge of sneers on too many faces.

Truth that was struggling is dead.

Best not to speak at all.

Let the world in, though,

That impossible branch of song,

To new pathways, new biologies.

Look back.

Has it not all been written of before?

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CROOKED ONE

.

Naked and moist am I

Burning with stars.

A sickle swept low

Severing chance.

Tongues silenced

Their excuses full,

The stories tedious,

Revealed as smoke.

One deep dark eye

That measures worth

Unblinking.

I bend slow and low

Gathering up and binding.

The web tied and untied

Between all things

That tastes of poetry

But is seed and blood.

Unmannered, hungry,

The world shall taste it

And be changed forever

We demean ourselves with pretty gods.

Lessen the glory of the pulse of life.

Fail to stretch beyond the familiar,

Discard the chance for conflagration.

A passionate average, a mean measurement,

A judicial lack of vision.

The wild world dances,

So we turn away to sink

To meagre cooling gruel from yesterday.

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CAILLEACH SAYS

.

This is what the

Cailleach says:

I have outlived you,

Outlived the fighting men

With their angry religions,

Their need to keep memory to themselves.

I have forgotten the years, forgotten even my names,

Forgotten all the homes belonging to myself and my daughters.

I walk about, best you if you challenge me.

I do not care that you live or die

Because you shall live and die.

Myself, my daughters, somehow

Avoiding the slaughter, avoiding the bombs,

Avoiding the pious, unholy glory of it all.

Living here and there, bringing luck,

Bringing healing,

Bringing you down-to-earth.

Where are we now?

I am the smoky one, the drift of smoke

Through your desolate city,

The ragged one, the forgotten one

Who cares for the small things,

Who teaches my daughters

To bend and survive, to make bread,

To give milk, to circle around edges,

To pick up the pieces that remain.

The thieves will come,

The do-good priests with their tall tales,

And the old men with their aches and jibes,

And the farmers with their complaints,

And the wind with its news of another war

Made by men.

And we shall remain,

Ragged, unnamed, silent, alone.

Us and our daughters

Holding on to the world.

With our keening and our shroud-clothes.

Waiting to wash the bones clean.

Waiting for goodness to be noticed.

The storm washes clean the slaughter-stone.

Moonlight on the darkening path.

.

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It flowers with the breath,

Unfurls like a fern on the hill.

A cuckoo thing from somewhere else,

Desiring to belong, to be heard.

A voice rumbling with thunder,

A hiss of rain, a roar of wave,

A keening of curlew.

Nothing new, though,

nothing new can ever be said.

Before the flocks, before the engines,

Before the need to be somewhere else.

Kite and buzzard wheeled high above here.

On their upward soaring voice,

The voice of moving, warmed airs.

With vision open, fixed on hope,

Their hunger to remain.

Insistent is the voice of a silent land,

Holding those who care, to stand still a while to hear.

From the ground, and from beneath that,

It will rise up in its own time.

An uncurling, a reaching thread,

A line of a melody,

A translucent tusk of language.

In the waters, between field and wood;

In the moments, as cloud shades and passes;

Before certainty and after doubt;

A voice weighs and judges its own worth.

The verses shall all bow down, bright-browed.

Prophecy is the love-child of thought.

Lost souls, reborn, eager to take flight again.

The root of my tongue is locked to a syllable of light.

A spark electric, a leap between precipitous cliffs:

The long darkness of being, the long darkness of non-being.

A slim, swaying golden chain

Rising up to eternity,

Sinking to iron-cold oceans.

It shall not cease til it ceases,

Takes breath, and speaks again:

The whispering of rock and stream and soil.

A mother’s voice, never lost.

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UPLANDS 3.

(Wellsprings of the sea)

It all begins from here.

Next to nothing.

With thoughts unrooted, heady.

Pulled out and upward to limitless blue distances.

It begins moving on the edge of the sedge-grasses;

On the uncertain, treacherous ground;

On the coolness of the wind that carries the spice of death

Deeply within its folds.

It begins on the copper whale-backs of time,

Arcing out of the valley floors,

Carrying scorched stars and the ink of jet certainty

Into the unknown orbit of delivered time.

It begins with a line of trajectory,

An abandoning of nicety,

An allowance of ululating song

And purposeless joy.

It begins with bones, begins with nakedness,

Begins with scattered remnants and piled stones.

It begins with remembering and forgetting,

And a pure tenacity to continue on.

It begins with a circulation of tears,

A saturated weight desiring heft.

Waters moving together, ribbons rippling out of sight.

Peat, brown as beer, iron-rich, blood of earth.

It begins before sound begins,

before the names arrive.

And then the names carry it into our own belonging,

Mapped out and pinned down steady.

Here and here and here,

we dwelt, we smiled, we died.

Always there, hinting blue, lost beyond reach.

Always yearned after, hazily recalled.

Always one step further, one crest away.

Always more real than the real,

Freer than freedom, a weightless soul flight.

There, with the buzzards, with the kites.

There with the patient grumbling stone,

With the stumbling cloud, the hissing mist.

A dream, really, of how it was, of how it will be.

The uplands of heaven, void and singing.

(40)

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UPLANDS (2)

Metres deep, feet, yards even,

Seasons deep, long years,

Scoured, strained, laid down,

A weight of water, a weight of

Tangled sedge-grasses, bones and stone,

Splayed, split on storm skies and roaming mist.

No one lives here long alone.

Bullied and pushed we must lay life on life,

Become entangled, near invisible,

Even to wheeling hawk, even to stoat and marten.

Tangle-rooted, stubborn as a song,

A narrow path wound between dry bluff and impossible wood.

The air here, though, pretends its own freedom.

Not trapped by contour nor disguised

As happy distance.

Pharoah’s prophet on Drigarn Ddu points an accusing finger.

The rules are here, laid out clear on rippled stone.

No wavering, no equivocation, no interpretation.

A bleak love and a hungry wind.

Garn Ddu on fire at sunset, the flashing shout of heather,

Open-mouthed, sinewed dust.

They still shall congregate on the circle of the horizon.

They shall come no nearer but yet beat your heart tender.

The Elders, entranced, caved-up, walled in rubble, unroofed.

Bitter beauty viewed from lascivious valleys: a yearning, there for here,

And here for there.

It is the paradox of the old religion heaped up to the silent sky.

The paradox of breath and flesh.

Leave it be. Become something else.

This impossible gradient burned into the land’s heart.

The desolation that gives us life.

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UPLANDS

1 (Near-eternal rules)

A perfect sky.

My tangled, old hands

forget themselves.

The valley dreams of the uplands and

The uplands dream of heaven,

and sing it so.

Easy it is to breathe its names

In the luscious sap

of hidden streams.

Easy it is to forget, though,

how to remain there,

Discomforted by continents of swelling air,

The sweeping veils of rain,

the unlikelihood of easy paths,

and how the weighted body

Yearns for flight

and how all thoughts always turn back

To the curling, dreaming bracken

and sullen silent stone.

The harsh gods gravitate here,

Born of flesh and born again,

with their horns and thunderheads.

Mud-spattered,

they hew and heft,

carve deeply the near-eternal rules.

Their language, as guttural, as singing,

as the falling crevices’ echo.

As the waters do,

melting away long millennia,

shaping bodies for breath

and for joy.

The deep folds of a planet’s shifting dream

Upon whose hunched shoulders

All the little things thrive.

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Pirate jay swings high through his dark wood,

Eye on falling gold.

.

Day gives out early now, evening inks the cooling world.

The sun is warm, but shadows cool the slowing sap.

.

What have we omitted in the long summer days?

What remains undone? What forgotten?

.

Late roses fall, beans fatten.

Soon the frosts come, green pushing faint and failing.

.

Gather in now, and wait for winter.

Inevitable increments, time winds it all up.

.

Pirate jay, his eye accomplished,

Swings round the rolling decks of weather.

.

The hills crowd darker dressed in cloud,

The woods velvet coal, a dreaming nest.

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This land, boy, is called history.

And she sleeps naked to the sky

And dreams of heroes.

.

This land wades through its weather,

Wrapped in stories, warmed by its belonging.

We are gnats here for an hour or two

Dancing above an eternal pool

Reflecting the sapphire deep skies.

.

This land stretches from shore to shore,

From sea to seabed, one continuous cloak,

A net of heart fires.

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If I can only stand still

Then all the competition shall fade away,

The last shall become first,

The first decay, and I shall remain.

If I can only stand still

As all sorrow and joy revolves about me

And blurs to time, and the time to eternity,

To one moment, and then that

To one who remained standing through it all.

If I can only stand still

The words shall come,

The truth and the prophecy

Will seed tremulous,

Hatch worlds

And pass away in wonder.

If I can only stand still

The fools shall stay silent,

The warriors grow tired of their excuses,

The rich find piety, the poor find solace.

If I can only stand still,

Give shelter to the small birds

And to the invisible weathers made of memory.

If I can only stand still,

The small light from the Pole Star,

Threading down my spine,

And only that one axis,

Held and held and finding peace there.

If I can only stand still,

Poised, regardless, rooted,

The vines solar, and the vines lunar

Winding up from my ankles.

Becoming rock, becoming mountain,

Becoming bark, becoming canopy.

If I can only stand still,

Place will become irrelevant,

Past, present, future

Roll up into a breath

And then not even that.

If I can only stand still,

It shall all be bestowed as a virtue,

As a beatitude, as a blessing.

If I can only stand still,

And not be this itching dust,

This hungry fire that must consume,

Consummate and move on, hungry still.

Made of dust and flowers,

Washed upon waves, sand sighed,

Sound sifted, shore-cast and motionless

With the roar of waves,

Unmoved, unrocked.

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