Posted in Uncategorized, tagged balance, elder, elder flowers, june, landscape, nature, Poetry, seasons, summer, time on June 1, 2014| Leave a Comment »
JUNE NOW
Days as laid out cream white,
Days as numbered and round,
Days as fragrant as elder.
Worlds turned facing sunlit skies,
Worlds warmed, fed and content.
Golden bowls, sky-blue bowls and green
Holding as much as may be.
For a few weeks, near perfect balance:
Heaven and earth set spinning
On fingertip of time,
A measured delight.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, belonging, landscape, layers, Otherworlds, painting, parallels, place, Poetry, symbol, time on May 19, 2014| 6 Comments »
WHITEBEAM OTHERWORLD
1
The desire to move
To the centre of silence
Where the big trees
Pin their shade
In the deep valleys.
Where big wings wheel
Marking an upward swing
Of stars and moments.
A cradled place,
Habitation of saints.
A long dust, incense
White hawthorn,
Incense lilac.
And the voice
Of dappled rivers.
2
The present slips
From between our fingers
But the past is always with us.
We, its shadow,
An uncertain glimmering
At the edge of cities.
Moving to Otherworlds
Where past and future
Dissolve the moments
Like sugar in water.
3
He writes the wisdom down
Upon his own skin,
A continual palimsest.
A fugue of breathings,
We flicker in and out
Of that dream,
Actors, watchers, or both.
Now summoned
We shall dance.
Dismissed,
Will return to shadow.
Close your eyes, love,
And see the world
As it is,
As it dreams itself:
Whole, hungry
And continually singing.
—-
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, belonging, Earth, full moon, healing, macrocosm, memory, Poetry, ritual.shamanic, stine circles, time on May 15, 2014| 1 Comment »
1
We are, after all,
Nowhere other than here:
Held in the soil-stained hands
Of earth.
Held as a wish, a dream,
A joy, a grief.
Gone home to rest, to be cast,
To be moulded, kneaded.
To be on the cycle,
To be recycled,
To be returned,
To be cherished.
2
The dream was of the great circles, Stonehenge, Avebury. Their function, to stop people “falling through earth”. To set them back on the wheel in the right cycle, the right place.
Using the right quality of sound and space, the right length of rod, the self-healed, snake-strewn ground.
3
Drawn up awake
But dreaming.
Brought all to the rivers
By moon-faced reflection:
The one face.
Drawn out awake
Yet asleep, soul’s home
Bright revealed.
Pierced by blade and bleeding,
Held, not allowed to fall through,
We shall be returned, given life.
Turned, turned , the road become moonlight.
Flesh golden, stripped of burdens,
Certain ratio, a spell of line and curve,
Placed on the wheel,
A language of trajectories,
Forces multiplied and compensated,
An art of vectors, of prophecy,
A heft of distinctions.
Revived with tongue and breath,
A dance in footprints,
The learning of a song,
Its thousand thousand verses.
Its drummed rhythms
Its curses, its blessings.
Jewelled serpent:
Her back, the path of the sun.
Remember,
Those of you who know,
The bite, the sting, the knowing.
4
There shall be three:
The child, the man, the woman.
Eternal, bound, faceted.
In threes the remembrance.
In threes the curse.
In threes, the healing….
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged attention, book of hours, Haiku-ish, hours of the day and night, landscape, May, monastic, nature, offices of prayers, Poetry, prayer, Spring time, time on May 14, 2014| 4 Comments »
4
(Nones)
Swallows dancing
At the eaves:
An architecture
Of song.
Round worlds:
Nests take
The form of heaven
The form of earth.
Lined soft,
Down heartbeat,
Safe and sound.
—
6
(Compline)
A perfect moon
In a perfect sky:
Perfect hymn,
Perfect prayer.
All night
In dew-wet fields
Lambs call to their mothers,
Mothers to their lambs.
On shrouded paths:
Solomon’s seal,
Lily of the valley.
Simple grace.
—
The original Hours of Prayer were seven, but over time some combined together, like Matins and Lauds at sunrise, and some seem to have been dropped, or abbreviated, like the Vigils throughout the night. We are poorer for some freedoms. The rhythms and tides of quiet attention lock us into a humbler being within the world.
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 clouds, dawn, Devon, frost, Haiku-ish, jackdaws, landscape, mist, morning, nature, Poetry, rain, rainbows, springtime, time on March 5, 2014| 4 Comments »
ONE MOMENT AFTER ANOTHER
1
The morning is
Daffodils and speedwell.
Above the tumble,
Jackdaws skim and surf
Blurred wind.
There will be,
(Say the clouds),
An afternoon of shadows
Collecting rainbows.
A season of light,
A thimble
Of forgetfulness.
2
Dawn reflex
A refection of cloud.
Nothing I could have done better.
Dappled elegance, cold blanket,
A tipping of scales,
A slow drift to the east.
A furrow, cross-cutting purpose,
A tiny friction, a wing-beat.
A sampling of enigmatic facts,
A certain blue
A certain distance,
A shading off into infinity.
(refection = a remaking, a nutrient, a food for body, mind and spirit)
3
New rising
Mist and birds,
Rising with the sun.
Rabbits pause and scatter.
Slow hills take form.
Heaven divides from earth.
A bleating of lambs.
4
Light in lines and waves
A moment mirroring
Off rooftop frost.
White grasses shudder and steam.
A birth of shadows, proud instants
No longer in between.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged being, dawn, death, father, memory, moving on, remembering, requiem, time on February 8, 2014| 8 Comments »
RETURNING SONG
Before daybreak,
In quieter airs,
A smaller dawn.
As a blackbird sings,
Before the hint of light,
An old man settles,
Rises,
Releases,
Returns.
Leaving the complexity, leaving the overlay of moments,
We are a simple tune, one or two notes,
A nursery rhyme, guileless,
Needing no elaboration.
Leaving the moments, leaving the overlay of complexity,
We are, always have been, a little dance, a gesture,
A ripple, delighted perturbation,
Needing no justification.
Yesterday on a distant coast,
Storm waters uncovered footprints
Left and right, made by wanderers
Nine hundred thousand years ago.
Traces return, unexpected,
Vanish, unexpected.
These roaring tides, these sands,
These comings and goings,
Noticed, unnoticed.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Devon, February, Haiku-ish, Imbolc, landscape, morning, nature, Poetry, seasons, time, weather on February 2, 2014| 2 Comments »
VALLEY SPIRIT
Over the last hill
Our prize is the view
Where the village nests,
Wood wreathed, woodsmoke.
Gathered fields almost,
Almost ready for spring
But patient, cautious,
Unhurried.
As unhurried as the morning.
Its grey lambswool clouds,
A blanket for Imbolc.
—
CROSS-HATCH
Imbolc morning:
Clouds like wolves,
And sheep.
Sun on all.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged being, fragmentation, landscape, lucidity, morning, Poetry, time, Winter on December 12, 2013| Leave a Comment »
ONE MOMENT
Falling, tumbled dreams,
Wisped, fragranced,
Catch, spin and fade.
Morning is white and still
With frost and fog.
Sparrows motionless, huddled,
Await the sun, on elder, on elm.
We are sustained only, it seems,
By our forgetfulness,
By our obsession to measure time
And watch it passing.
To fit and shape the minutes,
Assigning usefulness
Rather than joy.
Sad creatures,
Longing for the real,
And missing it.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, artefacts, crumbling, dream stream, eternity, fabrication, history, interiors, memory, mind, movement, museum, photo art, photographs, Poetry, reclamation, reconstruction, space, stillness, time, volume on October 15, 2013| 2 Comments »
Great Halls of Memory
Such a long time since last visiting The Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Completely misremembered its architecture and style. In my mind it was red brick and High Gothic, but no, now, at least, it seems to be Victorian Neoclassicism, all columns, domes and marble cladding. Perhaps there are corridors, rooms, floors, wings in different styles, different times, different memories.
Ascend the staircase,
The head that looks out,
The open dome,
The caverned stone skull.
Nothing else but a memory palace. Slow the heart, slow the eye,
The crowds blur and fade,
Their footsteps to whispers,
Their passing to plumes, dust motes dancing
.
All that remains, motionless, eternal: the memories, the constructions of memory, the shaping and honing of memory. The forms frozen and holy, the skilful turn of chisel and burin. Dark stairwells, cold. Curved stone scrolls, careful, less inhabited. The images of the dead, a maintenance of expectations,
The mental bones,
The bones of the mind,
The fossil fragments of heart,
Congealment.
Not as it was. Not as it seemed. Mind matter welded to timeless earth. An imposition of perfected memory, fabricated, polished. These we keep. These we cherish. These we honour – the bones of our ancestors, deep in our skull cities.
A record of dancing dust.
A reassessment of forgetting.
Mr Brown would come from afar,
Smiling sweetly ( eyes like jackdaws).
He would know, he would number the portals, the gateways, the porticoes, rearranged by time and place for fond ghosts to find then lose themselves. Hungry ghosts, longing, bored, wandering vestibular chambers.
Neither are they our memories
Harboured here.
Not ours, but wrenched,
Wedged, removed
From forgotten, desolate ruins.
Passed down by the impecunious,
The vanquished, the uninterested.
Our own little memories, ghost memories, too, no more sweetly harboured at sunset satisfied. They, wandering, away, pick trinkets in other lands, embellishments. Each time told remembered the last time told, the last time, told. An evolution of maps and stories, a hearsay, an edifice of straw and mud, an edifice of marble, collated by grain and polish, by echo, by echo eroded, by echo reborn.
Nothing but chaff and chatter
That fades at closing time,
The weight of stone time,
An instant frozen.
A pin dropping.
all the photographs here were taken on my visit. It was not my intention, time and equipment were not sufficient. But I salvaged a few blurry images and worked them a little.it is a place to go to summon strange juxtapositions,reflections,spaces
simonhlilly 