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Posts Tagged ‘time’

Y Foel, winged before the throne,

Raven-tipped, discreetly still.

The light behind her, barefoot, at the door.

No voice. A sighing distant cloud.

Peat dark pools hide skulls that speak

In tongues long gone, this curlew keening.

Our cynefin, our maes agored,

Our ffynnonau, as it were.

And there, Y Foel, seated calm,

Measuring the tides, turning still

From the neon worm, from the fiery fevered

Dreaming empty minds, rabid with wishful futures

That shall not hold.

And the moon there swinging through all her seasons,

Belly full with heroes, bright browed, long-armed, strong-thighed.

Awaiting their turn to return, to shine as blossoms do,

Petals falling in a western breeze.

Just out of sight: eternal sea’s lullaby, over dune and hedge,

Down deep lanes, around corners, the sudden dip to sandy lip.

A taste of salt, a changing glorious thinning light.

And the blue hills over there, always cool,

Measuring the Fall, the weight of Sin, the road to redemption,

The longing dusty road of skin, sun-washed, footsore,

Limping from meagre shade to shade, seeking forgiveness.

Myrddin weighed down and lost in exiled dream.

Name and purpose abraded, worn smooth in seasons’ river.

This last day of summer,

This last day of spring, this last day of autumn,

This long night, the iron edged anvil winter.

Little cat, we grow old here together,

By what fires we kindle.

And whatever the season,

The flowers of bombs

Forever blossoming.

–

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Nought now stays.

White wings distant.

Day shimmer, leaf shade lost.

Time was, though now no more.

Nought crosses that barren path,

The squeeze, the funnelled fate.

Linger long – each season’s taste

Turns bitter, sour, bitter-sweet.

A dust leaf dissolving, swallow call fading,

Fading, bones of snow, wind-chafed blossom.

Flicker, flicker in a mind nested barren.

Nought, nought. The castle’s teeth are pulled,

Lords and ladies scattered.

A cold wind eats all comfort.

A cold wind sweeps tattered hopes away.

On the mountainside the fires still burn.

Centuries on, the battles lost and won.

This four chambered heart deserted now.

The pulse river race corrodes day’s edge.

Nothing honed here but blocked out monolith,

A cliff where clings an apple tree,

Lost to the world, dangling awen’s river.

One who waits forgetting,

one who waits the end of grieving.

Season’s sea shorn of wonder,

The very marrow of emptiness.

Nought. The ripples rain, grey slanted slate.

The delve, the shattered dust, the sorry land.

Scarred, forgot, grown green again by chance.

All this, a blink of an eye, a long lamenting lope.

Forgot, he howls, he keeps a deep tally there,

Beneath the song, the dip and stretching growing light.

One line for day, one for night,

One for this dreaming husk,

One for the bright girl by the waters, there.

White wings, distant.

The swinging sun ricochets them hither.

Whistling souls, cloud charmed, tremulous.

A keening on the heart plains, soul calling, calling.

A happy crowd, companionable, garrulous.

Vast as days, their numbers numberless.

All the white souls feathered, endless sway.

The found, lost. The lost, found.

Each the other’s ghost, hand in hand, laughing.

So sleek the flicker light the world spin,

Warming, cooling.

The roar at the edge of the world:

One by one, the seasons tip over,

Disappear.

The roar at the edge of the mind:

One by one, the words topple over,

Disappear.

–

Detail of a photo work ‘Dark Dell’

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A piece written after reading some excellent though extremely labyrinthine poetry by David Jones, which merged with memories of a bookshop at Aberystwyth, and a very hot summer at the end of the world.

The bookshop by the sea,

a roaring word feather,

groomed perfect perfumed owls,

horizon eyes half closed, half dreaming.

Butter would not melt

though a burning sun darkens the door.

Swell and sweat in season’s love,

we shall not see its like nor its disrobed disgust,

nor its glory, once we are dust between pages

tied to ink hard-pressed, etched in acidic misery.

The stinging tongue, salt-wiped, wrapped in salve:

praise the saliva saving insolence and swell tides lost

but leaping, fornicated, fenestrated, facilitated,

heaped wave on wave that the land shudders

and shall not stand, but millennia by millennia,

in minuscule and majuscule, each season lose an inch,

a scarred edge falling to mud- bright mind-stuff,

the dust of eloquence snorted by hogs.

Our lightning bright fire tree blazing, but all consumed,

sentenced by relentless awen-tide that so rides and roars,

roundless, relenting nothing, to save nothing, nor to stoop

nor to stop it all, but bare, to eat to the bones

all this roving, revolving wonder.

And the seasons flick their greasy fingers,

sated but still reaching for more.

An addict for glory, a crucifixion stretched on four pillars,

The world woman opened for birth

and for more, for more.

A gentle Spring in the hills, death under the greening hedge and byre.

A gentle Summer, despite the fierce toothed light

a fading, fading fight for breath.

A gentle Autumn: tears on the valley mists

and the webs of warfare stretched between limbs

of the dying light.

A gentle Winter, at last a silence wordless,

millstone grating mountain and sickles blunt, stars exploding,

cessation the heart centre maelstrom,

gravity roaring it all down to itself.

The chambers of the soul undressed.

Time stretched too far to return to its shape.

Hope collapsed, changing, clanging, clinging,

the mother births and births again.

Eternal flower, feed us, feed us.

Take us not from the pap of love, the hill of glory,

the fortress of light.

We have watched the seasons come and go

and still have yet to learn anything.

Save us from the men who plan.

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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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