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Posts Tagged ‘voices’

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DHRUPAD 16 (samhain slips by)

We thrum year long year long inescapable inescapable echoes
they say as if as if as if there were something
eternal ineffable about to be spoken though now we wait and
there seems to be nothing but a small wind and the river’s sound and the hiss and hum in the fire of time cascading changing leaving leaving
the door is open the door is closed the draught of it moves the clock’s hands a little ever so little towards a midnight midnight
sitting quiet and upright shawled in stars looking for language taking futures from strands stranded past the pain still listing twisted too hard to let go of too hard too preciously golden edged.
Names all their names uttered at once a storm river
the trees reach sway and sea march inland between the salt grasses one or two feathers glutinous congealed no longer for flight but maybe sharpened pointed or word
the scrape on vellum
careful careful
meaning will pounce and the size for the translucent thin gold
to hold haloes and beginnings where the saints heads roll down to the deep well’s echo.
That is where it all leads the dust the dirt the glory down down down to the soils end
to the speaking dreaming rock that quakes and shivers under angels wings all under angels wings.
Mixed is their histories and their passions and their stories and the endless excuses and the smouldering lusts and the hope for more or something else or more
or more
or more in a heartbeat it flows away
ungraspable music the night slays the flow the midnight bell the round horizons ring and the warm throbbing stones and the shift of roots and the heads rising rising up with eyes in the fast rain cool and flowering here now here we all are again
now quiet yourselves quiet yourselves
and we shall clothe ourselves in your passion and whisper futures to you while you while you breath and twist and curl upon the dreams we dream the same dreams still in the same voices and the same curses and the same blessings as our heads roll
severed into deep holy wells and slaked again our thirst slaked and fathomed and fold the wings so silent land lusts pure and everlasting as cleansed as
the dawn the dawn of tomorrow pale and thin and growing out from the slumber of it
seeded and uplifted grown mighty and tender.
Dream and dream and wake and sleep think thoughts and songs
we know all your words and in the order you speak them and in the lilt and muscle of your standing there
for we do not go we do not go we are not yonder we are not yonder slow the hours as ghosts we wander.
A shimmer of breath and a heartbeat that fades we dream we dream we dream between each breath and harvest.
Give what we must get what we can a festival of small flames and a sweeping of stars we plunge into the earth on every horizon map the paths you walk see they are our paths our places named and unnamed naked and smooth we bite the moment and walk between to greet you to
greet you to greet you our lovely dreams
our lovely dreams our swaddled babes our dearest wishes we greet you sigh and fill all space go nowhere go nowhere listen listen listen our lullaby lullaby lovelove
love we thrum yearning year long echo echo echo a small wind in the long night and a midnight door swinging open open shut but not locked never locked the fire is lit always always and tea is on always always
you know the path and tea is ready tea is ready in the birdsong afternoon by the shady trees and the distant sound of children playing and the hum of bees and something something something to remember to say, something to say.

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SOMETHING TO BE SAID (MAYDAY)

Pauses grow longer, a melancholy may soon creep in.
We cannot escape our own voices.
( “We rarely go out these days and visitors, though longed for,
are a great discomfort”).
It is a wild guilt that wants our words in other’s heads.
Always a nuisance and a pleasure
to be infected with poetry,
to admit the familiar voices, to see which one leads, this time, the hunt.
Gwyn ap Nydd collecting souls, the ghosts of words,
The white words, the vapoured words,
the haunted words – as poetry is.
‘White, Son of Mist’ – like the morning,
the first attempt at May, after a night of rain,
new in stillness and birdsong, mist on green land,
the ash trees still thinking about their coming fountains of flowers,
roots wriggled so deep in the past, and aching old.
The dunnock’s sweet descent.
It filters down as if spider webs
And gold dust – the flecks
Of memory and forgetting.
A city with loud inhabitants, unkind and strange.
A darkness punctuated with doors and reasons.
As if it didn’t matter, everything collapses.
The moment passes, the tongue gives up.
It cannot make the chords that the brain sings in,
Just one note at a time, syllable by.
There is something to be said for silence.
The way the mist in its own dreaming gravity
Slides along the slopes
And settles in the cwms.
The way it shifts space.
The way it delineates what is not itself.
With what would we fill these silences
Should all the voices stop?

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When they speak it is rivers.
It is pines roaring in the wind.
It is sparrows at daybreak,
Swallows in blue open skies.
It is the rain in old gutters.
Vague as mist-hugged valleys.
Harsh as ravens and the keening
Of spread-winged kites.

And yet it fades and falters
Year by year pushed to a further edge,
The language of grass and trees,
An anachronism.
As if it had not tumbled down
From the highest empty uplands.
As if it had not been passed along
The careful tales and whispered spells.
As if it were not that simple coagulated dust
Brushed from God’s own hands.

Jealous of its rainbowed fluctuations,
A by-passed parish, a redundant economy.
It is a sad craft that kills the past.
It is a miserly mind that accepts
No drop of mystery to remain.

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Book of Voices ( This Sky: part 2)

Each cell voicing its own obituary,
Each mitochondrial Neanderthal fire-watching,
Knapped sound, flint words, held, tapped,
A feel for languid, mushroomed word
( so much glory hidden tangled beneath a milk stream
Of holiness, food, fingered, fluvial through substrate,
A healthy holy rot).
All with voice, all with dawning chorus of song.
An evacuation, a cacophany profane, blessed,
A golden urgent urination ( just so),
A mineral-rich, arcing satisfaction, an urge,
Urgent, unguent, a chrism (even), an eventide
And morning of the first day.
Smudged, succumbed, scumbled, it solidifies
And whispers itself out.
Such clarity cannot hold, a boiled ferment bakes dry,
Returns to sleep, mist rises in the valley,
Stars become acceptibly few, named, blink in and out.
The voices turn to their own dreams involuted,
A cochleal murmur suspended,
Slow revolving wrapped sleeping in spider-webbed tranquillity.
Sleep whilst you can, sleep in unity, in slow breathing
Revolved planetary orbits. Sleep pretty and woven.
Eyes lidded now, eyes lidded.
(Words, fragile as insects, scurry iridescent
Into darkness.)

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MAGATAMA SAYS

Magatama says this is what you are, a wriggle in time, a wriggle in space. An eye that is hollow, a mind that is hollow, a space where, a vessel where, sentience pools and flows through. Embryo spinning round sun yolk. A distinction, a seam, a pebble, an accumulation of used data, a debris, a morraine, a momentum of moments lost, not quite forgotten.
A tube, sealed at either end with only hope. It will not suffer to remain. It too will distort amd become formed, reformed. The spin of horizons never long denied. A new in and a new out. A new edge, a new world, given names from somewhere else. The hollow eye, for the hollow eye does not see except what it has seen before. Somewhere there was a beginning, but it was not here, not here. Each key becomes a door, each door a wall, each wall a cell, each cell a wondering of me and mine, a selfish small delight, a harbouring of dream. Now the tide slips, the shattered, polished brilliance fades. We are left high, drying, the long keening of gulls, sandflies and bladderwrack. No more words. Day becomes day.
Scatter, scatter,
Ye stars!
Scatter,
Ye manifold living beings!
However so far
This home
Shall never become lost,
(though misremembered,
Though mistook),
So wrapped, so folded,
So entangled it is
Within your sheer fibre,
Your fluid, your feeling.
Flee as far as
Beyond the named,
Further than edge,
Farther than form.
Digging foundations for what walls exist, reconstructing our noble and grave histories, mirrors and clouds, equations, flocks of reasons seeking a roost, a reputation. The sun has hidden herself in a cave. Where is the sly shaman will entice her out with curiosity? Shiny things, laughter of others. Wrapped up in, wrapped around and upon ourselves. In becoming out, out in, the curve of edge, empty but for its own density.

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The scratching, sketching reveals magatama is also an ear, an orifice that listens, that absorbs…..and so too, turns doodling into that ubiquitous Celtic mysterious icon, the ‘trumpet spiral’, or for the more botanically minded, the mushroom divided, or for those who watch the way waters weave, the rippled surface vortex……but the doodle as doodle, as gesture, as delight of wrist, it is an outward sweep, a slow arc, an inward sweep, conch consciousness, two shapes from one line, an ineffability, a mystery, a going out and a return, the shape of a soul. Spirit language. It is always tricky, always says more than it says. Clouds conversing with hills………

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