Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Mari Lwyd, photography, Poetry, tradition, Wales on January 15, 2017| Leave a Comment »
MARI LWYD 3
We follow sightless bones
Through the narrow door into a New Year
Because white bones and sightless eyes
Are the only things ever to pass through
From now to the future.
The wise will wander aimlessly,
Lost, discussing the dark paths, the short cuts,
The less muddy way.
We will stumble drunk and aimless
And find the warm door
And ask the right question
And fall to sleep
As the voices laugh
And roar
And the light
Slowly rises and fades.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, landscape, Mari Lwyd, mystery, photography, poerty, the past, tradition, unknown, Wales on January 15, 2017| Leave a Comment »
MARI LWYD 2
Sparks spin into night.
Through darkness a white ghost moves.
We follow, laughing.
Landscape remains.
Mind stays the same.
It is only the light
That changes,
Only thoughts
That come and go.
The music of it all
Remains,
Though the notes
Are constantly rearranged.
This dream so real
We fear there is no other.
We follow the grey empty void
For which we have made sparkling eyes
And a name and a thunderous roar;
And filled it with questions and answers,
Sustaining itself in darkness,
Intruding into our hearth.
Skull empty judge,
Bent bone and curved empty,
A void of time.
Lacerating tattered hearts
The wind that scars the hills
And incrementally erodes
Once warm moments
Wearing down words to screams,
Wisdom to leaden clubs.
A white sky.
Snow cold are the hills.
The rain freezes.
Beauty is not for you to survive,
But to savour
And then to long for forever.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Mari Lwyd, New Year, photography, Poetry, the numinous, tradition, Wales on January 15, 2017| Leave a Comment »
A sequence of connected works, or variations, to do with Time, New Year, tradition and mysteries. The Mari Lwyd, (‘Grey Mare’) is a horse’s skull decorated and carried on a long pole that goes round houses on New Year’s Eve exchanging banter for food and drink. It seems like a really ancient tradition and has the edgy, initiatory, feel of the oldest of memories.
Part One
MARI LWYD
A fluid darkness, a slow river wind.
Wild torches taste change, sparks tumbling into tomorrow.
We follow laughing, the Mari Lwyd with the wild futures
As all before have done this New Year’s Eve in the old valleys
Lost in the darkness, these hills watching, loomed.
Following the Grey Mare who tests the wit and want,
And begs for food and the oblivious warmth of drink,
To remember and forget the fading paths, the slender chance,
The fatal message.
A laconic nightmare stirred up for a vigilance and a testing,
Slick and breathed upon with frost death, breath white sheet cloud,
An ectoplasmic emission, the dancing myth of earth,
A decay and return of Time to its rightful round.
Not a horse of this world, patient in the paddock.
A night horse, all will ride willy-nilly,
And a rough ride or a wild drunk banter.
We ride the words, we ride the stories, into the night.
The torches are well made, but will still gutter and die in dawn’s drizzle.
Mari Lwyd is mute this year – no wit left amongst these sundered tribes,
No one can recite the triads, utter the names of things, the innuendo beneath the sheet.
We rake over ashes, but for want of fuel the fires will die
(And perhaps they should, perhaps they should).
A new fire, the valley snaking north, caught glorious in a winter dawn.
The light slides deep, across pale oaks and forest boughs,
Slides with shifting cloud across the tops, across the fields.
The bones of things dressed in warmth,
But it is only the bones of things that will ever pass
Through and along and between the long nights,
And into the death and birth of years.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, bards, landscape, landscape photography, Poetry, tradition, Wales on November 19, 2016| 2 Comments »
Hills behind
There are hills behind the hills,
Words behind the words.
Clouds of understanding billow up
Then dissolve to fog.
The old words, the mountain words,
The river words –
No matter how fast you move,
You can never catch up with them.
The old words,
They have the deepest roots.
We sit by the forest edge,
Sky and grasses and the sallow dell.
Starlings shift and rise
From field to field.
Their patterns weave small tongues,
Bright eyes.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged holiness, landscape photography, memory, Mid Wales, Poetry, sacred space, Strata Florida, tradition, Ystrad Fflur on September 29, 2016| 2 Comments »
Ystrad FFlur 2
one door in an empty field.
a pattern of stone,
the chantry coves.
clouds are sheep and cattle
drifting slowly out of sight.
but for the peace you would not know
poets and kings were buried here.
we cannot stay
but maybe never leave,
like the pilgrim stream
whispering prayers
on cool, light feet.
like the tinted copper beech
and the hollowed yew.
like the faith of thousands
and the recitation of the birds.
the green edict of grass
has covered all dissent.
a spiral stair ascends
into empty air.
the old names adhere somehow,
the slow erosion of autumn rains.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestral bones, awaiting, awareness, cascade and tuning, Coleridge, consciousness, dawn, distinction, dream, elegy, his angels, his ghosts, language, little or nothing, moment, orbiting, Poetry, solitary practice, Sorley MacLean, spring, the ghost of Blake, tradition on February 17, 2014| Leave a Comment »
VEIL
Here, embedded in small, lapsed
Suspended moments,
(Gossamer, silk, turning)
Too early, too late,
Webbed with inconclusive dream,
Stirred spirallings, seed of wind and light.
A weighing and disregarding
(The shallow confusions of purpose)
Sense and organs of sense
Bow to slow breath:
The fine, high transformation:
Time into space
Dissolving to time once more
(A thin cloth, this melting memory).
They sing,
Though there is nothing
To sing about,
They turn and wander
Unaccompanied, perfect,
These angels, these spirits,
These exhalations of earth.
A moist dawn air-
News from the sea,
Too soon for Spring,
Yet Spring has begun.
Moving on from now:
An arc of returning gravity
Held, pulled, this roaring love.
The eloquent have learned to
Separate and divide,
A weighing of threes
(These simple roads forgotten).
Coleridge would stir in sleep
Mud, slow drying, on coat and boot,
One fading leaf, one budding stem
Has all the answers
We shall ever need
An we blink
An we stay awake.
The slow sonority-
An old man tastes
The luxury of ancient language,
A fine whiskey
Sweet with smoke and bitterness.
His rhythm is a road across hillsides,
A road into morning.
A fine line
Dividing weeping
And contentment,
As it always is,
As it always
Is.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, cloud script, entrainment, language, literacy, musing, orality, pen and ink-ish, script, spelling, time, tradition, water script, writing on October 8, 2013| 8 Comments »
SERRY
What is said,
This moment,
This word,
Is real, torn, squeezed,
Extruded
From heart and breath
And world.
This sly scribble,
A snake that curves
And curls tight,
Brain deep.
My thoughts
In your voice,
A mask,
A masking.
Laid down,
A trap, cunning gin
Tongue-tying,
Strident
(Though even whispered).
Time bomb.
We sing in chords,
In chorus.
Drum on flesh and earth
Together,
Drum with feet,
Drum with tongues.
Together ululate,
A stampede, a flock.
Syncopate pulse,
We merge.
Never this
String of thought,
Tugged out to tie senses,
Alone, locked on paths
With no cessation.
A spell, an enchanting,
Mazed: ink and electron
Dancing grim tango.
Entangled, entangled
In mind or mouth,
Striving to know escape
Or to know belonging.
The mute language of skies,
The sing of cloud dissolving.
Being nothing
But ourselves
We dive down
And drown.
What i mean is
What eye can mean
What mean is even tranquil
What line dances
What dance thrills out
Worlds words
See spy the key
Notation
Reminders
Remain
Only.
A cool breeze lifts the poplars
A cool breeze learns sound,
Then passes back to silence.
—–
Sparked by a pile of books, a passage of time.
The title, originally ‘Orality’ ( a new word to me, precise and useful but somehow ugly) I changed to ‘Serry’, a very nice concise, old word that sums up both restriction and unity….( I randomly found it whilst checking the spelling of ‘cessation’!).
simonhlilly 