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Posts Tagged ‘transformation’

WILD HUNT

I am lost

So I am yours, Gwyn.

Driven mad, worn thin,

By the fickle certainties of man,

The lies of the blood

In the lees of trust.

To slip and wriggle

Into cracks and crevices,

To numb as many seconds

As we may.

Kneel down in the soil

And weep.

You are clay that knows death

And have learnt a mechanical time

So as to watch its coming.

The whispered “This is how it is”.

That is a lie weighed down

By the phantasms of others’ dreams,

Souls worn wan draped in dust.

If we are not reborn

Then where does this yearning come from?

If we are not reborn

Why does music bring so many tears?

If we are not reborn

Whence the joy, whence the sorrow?

If we are not reborn

How do our desires arise?

Whence our dissatisfactions?

If we are not reborn

What purpose does hiraeth serve?

What purpose the stirring of the blood?

The bones of trees

I turn to small hopes.

Collect your souls, Gwyn.

Scatter them into a new Spring.

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THE ROSES

The roses

They have been in bud

For months

Through sun and rain.

Now they open,

Bloom for a day or two

Giving joy to all,

Then fade and

Fall apart.

The roses.

The roses.

They throw off their beauty

Like dancers.

They value more

Their roots

And their thorns.

The blood red hips,

The hard won strength

To go on.

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WARRIOR PRAYER

Oh Moon-Face. Your unguent drips from my fingertips.

Shades of dead universes flit across the dark sky.

We long for this as much as we long for otherness.

Moon-Face, we construct the spells that feed you,

So sleek and willow-limbed.

This is how we made you:

A womb to hold all the weeping dead.

Born again as owls, as worms, as dreams in blooming girls.

In flowers pushed up through sacred, spiced earth.

Poured out with the salmon spawn and the eggs of serpents.

Split open and oozed in the nests of eagles,

Drying in the daylight, voiceless and crying.

The taste I remember – iron and oceans,

And the slip slop of long tides

And the waking shape of salt.

The taste of footprints and warm belly

And secret clefts and caves of echoes.

The taste I remember of the sharp bright edge,

Honed bright and sunlight, severed

By its arcing swing.

Oh Moon-Face. You eat the seconds so.

You eat the minutes and the moments.

Bound, wired and woven to the haft of sound.

The blade that cuts through space.

The light so soft, it can eat life and death

And never be fuller than it is, than it is.

Moon-Face. Keep your promise

And we shall die again, happy.

We will not forget your sweet hunger.

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THE OLD TALIESIN

He does not have to raise his voice –

Silence comes with it like the tide on the shore.

Bent-backed, i see his strong staff, serpent-wrapped.

It is still a tree of fruits, sweet and bitter:

A crab apple scented with autumns, hard with frost

And the seeing of too much sorrow.

I see his bright brow, bald as the moon.

He is being chased again through the halls of the world

By another who shall not relent.

And he will change form again,

On wide, sunlit oceans again,

But not until the three drops congeal in truth,

Not until the chariot wheel is cracked,

Not until a new axle pin is shaped and smoothed.

A year and a day,

And we shall all change places.

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BONES

Do you hear your bones speaking?

Of the groaning glaciers and the ice waters

Released from the dark caves.

Of the small things you do not weigh up.

Of the large things, so large you are oblivious.

Of the earth swaying on tip-toe

To see the glorious horizons

That the gods dream of.

Of the rumble of sunlight

Piercing the hillside cairns.

Of the feathered footsteps

Of the reborn.

Under the still shade of the yew trees

Your bones speak,

But all you feel is fear.

The tipping point, the cliff edge.

Fingertips turn to pinions,

A hunger for corpses.

You can never steal the gold

That is the due of the gods,

Nor the silver that is the blood of the moon.

It shall all be returned.

That is what your bones say.

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LOST 1

My white winged soul is over the sea,

Low over the silver waters,

Far from sight, for duty

And the hope of peace.

Gone from this world,

Gone from the next,

Spiralling down to earth

To scour the debris of other’s joy.

There is some small joy in loss,

But not this loss.

Settled and content were we,

As rocks on a sun-warmed hillside

( the popping of gorse, the dust of heather,

the impermanent river of skylarks).

Settled and content, rippled in sheltered shade

(the hum of bees, the dance of gnats).

But each change brings irrevocable change.

Worlds end at every whim,

The ruins dreaming in emptied desolation.

Time, a syncopated stutter

To relive or forget in themes.

The moment before death –

An unravelling of strategy and excuses.

Something pure there, something silent,

Something wrapped beneath the pain and sorrow,

Something unutterably sweet, something eternal flickers

Before the moment and the light dies.

Before the terrible glorious cauldron darkness,

The seething dice thrown before dawn

Where we have lost our voices

And must learn to sing again,

Sound by sound.

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ORACULAR MESSAGE

In the woods, in the green wet woods

The dead are waiting with their songs.

.

They have longed for their flesh and they have forgotten.

The rivers are full of their passions.

It is a cold steel desire, a lust like winter.

.

It is gone now, subsided into multiplicity,

The tracks lost, the flash of prey in the bushes,

All become unintelligible like a valley dissolves in driving rain.

.

But the dead are waiting there with their slim fingers

To crack open your sight, to break open your eyes

The release the hawk of your mind, the hungry raven of your heart,

The river of your reason.

.

This is for you, a prophecy for you

Because you have read these lines,

Because of the intersections of the stars,

Because you are nothing but this,

About to be forgotten, about to be lost.

.

The dead are waiting in the woods, singing and dancing,

Forgetting everything.

.

You have dreamed enough.

You have destroyed enough.

.

They slide between species, have no regard for distinctions.

They breathe the matter ejected from shuddering galaxies into the void.

.

These words are not for you

But you must remember them and pass them on.

They are for the last one who leaves.

Who turns to flick the light switch

And with a small smile steps into darkness.

.

Tell them the dead are waiting in the green mossy woods.

Tell them to listen for the sighing song

For the surprise of pine scent drift singing storm winds.

Tell them to remember the small things,

The notions that eat worlds.

Tell them the dead are waiting

To take them home.

.

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A MANTRA OF HEALING

in flowering mist

the vague precisions of light.

amongst the deep sounds

of singing silence

a spinning word

casts out tentative meaning

what are we, if not

remembered stories?

paths not yet faded

into oblivion.

stumbled upon brilliance,

gracefully falling

into new forms.

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DAYS NOW

Days now the whispers come and go

worm words generated from earth,

words of smoke, words of plants.

.

Turn sideways, become thin,

slip between one day and another,

at the year’s ending so little noise.

.

These stars – they are not now,

they have burned bright and died

a million, million years ago.

.

Therefore, I bow down and breath deep

the dead light of our ancestors,

gone and here and gone again.

.

Time is the fat of stars;

seeping in the long years,

other glorious mornings long gone,

distant golden mornings,

other silent rooms, other footsteps.

.

Nothing goes to waste

but slowly changes from what it was

woven threefold into other days.

.

The Magister holds starlight in his crystal spheres

to rot them down to raven’s wings

where seconds copulate birthing strange homunculi.

.

They know the answers only the dead know

in butterfly whispers etching notions,

as acid reveals the jagged web of meteorites.

.

He is old now,

his bones creak like galleons do.

His mind, though, a bright moon in a stormy sky

for he is, he says, acquainted with all the demons

that dwell beyond law and science,

who converse in riddles

and move as if dancing upon other gravities.

.

Their heads are broken open,

their orifices sprouting green tendrils,

their skin, inhabited scrolls

where letters form and reform in curious calligraphies.

.

Lascivious is their language,

exotic and full of lilting innuendo.

Their madnesses are roads untrod before.

.

He reads the books that have never been opened,

by walking backwards through mirrors.

His only sustenance, the tiny measurements of primordial dust

wherein he seeks his own eternal name.

.

He practices the mudras of teaching and of dissolution.

His words fall sparsely in vast space

like birds that fly across a still sunset sky.

.

Their skin peeled back, returned to light

they tend their dripping hives,

honey vowels, the sigh of release.

They climb upon one another,

puncturing their certainty,

melting into each other’s futures.

.

The sawhorse shall be put together.

A new constellation shall appear in the southern sky

as Betelguese, or its ghost, or its future,

Weighs the likelihood of eternity.

.

The world is fire and light

and time is the fat of stars.

The apple winces in its dawn frost,

The sequoias sing to planet’s spin.

.

Clear facts stumble unheeded through forest fires

whilst ungainly notions dress the moments.

.

The alembic bubbles and quivers,

uncertain whether it can hold

the sentience of its own soot.

.

Still the Great Work must continue.

In holiness we are rubbed out completely

imagining new wings, writing new musics.

.

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OFFERING AT LLYN CARRIG BACH

Down through green waters
holding on to nothing
but one gift and that is
not a name given me
nor any weight accrued.
A lightness of purpose
bows my spine, the familiar
flickers and fades.

Down through brown waters
summers deep. I am peeled
reflected transparent
becoming triple, a tongue only,
a dance chained to eloquence,
a swift blade and its ghost only.
Sunlight and its memory
sprout seeds. Bright rolling hills.

Down now the black black tides
too deep to know how deep,
the glue of space and time slivers.
Cloaked I am now in a
thousand, thousand names.
A single word transfixes all.
A cauldron, a chalice, a pot suspended.
Gentle enough is the heat of that breath,
Slow slow and smooth the strokes of air.

Down through self-luminous waters
beyond all monsters and their messages.
Beyond all thresholds, all territories.
Suspended, all that I was, poured out
as a haul of fish slithering from its nets,
silver and glistening moment forgotten.
Hatching, there are pinions unfurled,
a cry rising up into a long throat.

Down through star-filled waters.
Bubbling up: the names of rivers and sea deities,
and warriors of watched misty islands
and cold air, spray-filled, and cries of gulls.
The hiss of sand blown through marram dunes.
Mistaken for a notion who is now a god,
footprints elide, pooling perfect syllables:
a sprinkle of star-flowers, the promise of dusk.

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