Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Autumn, chapel, Haiku, landscape, landscape photography, peace, Poetry, Soar y Mynydd, solitude, Wales on November 23, 2017| Leave a Comment »
SOAR Y MYNYDD
Where we rest
Deep in the mountains:
Soar y Mynydd
Hung in autumn air
Its white walls glowing:
Riverside chapel
Neat as it may be:
A congregation of leaves
Patiently waiting.
Soar y Mynydd.
Even when people have drifted away
The river sings hymns.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, cold, landscape photography, Poetry, seasons, waiting, Wales, Winter on November 19, 2017| 2 Comments »
TO WAKE IN WINTER
To wake in the long darkness
And feel the slow cold seep in.
To love, and to war against those
We do not love, is not enough.
Drained and wan, the ache of it.
The decay of worn roads and reasons.
The ravens are silent as they push
Against the folds of cloud.
The hills ripple but they do not rise.
We miss the touch of sudden sunlight
And a simple purpose to go on.
Is patience a curse or a virtue?
—
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Autumn, landscape, patience, Poetry, time, timing, Wales on November 8, 2017| 2 Comments »
It is the changing light
That is making the distant hills dance.
It is the falling voice of crows
That weds autumn to the stilling air.
It is the accumulated weight of days
That pales the valley oaks to gold.
It is the forgetting of our own dreams
That fills us so with pathless grey dawn.
It is only hour by hour in the garden’s work
That we learn a steady, silent patience.
Bending down to earth between a hum of flowers
Doing only what can be done,
Doing only what is timely.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, disaster, elegy, existence, fire in Llangammarch, grief, life, loss, Poetry, tragedy, Wales on October 30, 2017| 6 Comments »
Llangammarch Blaze
There now, lay it all down,
The soft memory and the memory of hard bone.
After the year’s first true frost
A dead sheep lies in the field becoming a dance of hawks and ravens.
And on a lonely hillside unremarked
A blaze has born the babies away.
A smudge of smoke and the light of morning
Is no prayer of peace to ones who wait
Empty-hearted for better news.
The village, warm now in sun, silent.
Thoughts unthought of before – friends vanished,
Those known, now unplaced, a hollowness
Around memory clung to.
It is an uncertain anchor to hold on to –
This world that blinks apart from day to day.
Should we rise and flow like the oak leaves
On the cold dark currents of the Irfon?
Or wrap around like ivy, cling like lichen bloom
To this weathered stone.
We are a thin soil that the wind will blow and the waters leach.
The babies are gone who should be dancing.
The mothers silent, slowly dissappearing.
Pick it back to the bare bones.
Feed the world with our ripped out sorrow.
We are nothing. But we were loved.
Once named, now melted back to everything.
A thin soil on scarred stone.
Golden are the tree tops, a palest blue sky.
The ravens dance in their ring, in and out,
While the sun still shines,
While the sun still shines.
written as the news was emerging about the great and tragic loss in our small village. A family house destroyed by fire in the night, a few children escaping, but many more lost. Llangammarch now besieiged by hordes of prying press and film crews.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancient stones, landscape, landscape photography, Llanynis, Llewelyn ap Gruffudd, peace, Poetry, Powys, remembrance, Wales on October 29, 2017| 3 Comments »
Llewelyn’s Last Morning
(Mass at Llanynis)
A bright morning
for Llewelyn.
Sun through cloud,
The white trees
in waiting.
River is hushed
And the hymns
urgent and quiet.
Before you and after you,
these stones:
Ship of God,
anchored in meadowland.
Before you and after you:
This carved stone pillar,
Woven knot
and lichen bright.
In memory,
to lay them at peace who fell,
Their names are
grass’s whisper only.
—
The last native Prince of Wales, Llewelyn ap Gruffudd, is said to have had communion at this small church on the morning of 11th December 1282 before he and his troops were betrayed and ambushed a few miles away on their way to capture Builth castle. It is a small church, not now easy to find, and lies in the middle of a field with only one or two farms nearby. Across the River Irfon at Cilmeri is the well where Llewellyn’s severed head was washed. His troops were scattered and the cause of a Wales ruled by their own nasty, Welsh, nobility ( as opposed to nasty Anglo-Norman nobility), lost. The carved cross-stone looks to be an old grave slab, carved on three sides, but I have found no information about it. In general, these stones were carved between the 9th and 13th centuries – so it would probably have been in the church or churchyard in Llewelyn’s time.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Cambrian Mountains, haibun-ish, Haiku-ish, landscape, meditative ramblings, Mid Wales, painting, Poetry, reaching towards, sketches, variations on a, Wales, walking through memories, words and images, work in progress on October 26, 2017| 5 Comments »
—
NOTES FOR A PAINTING
Sunlit meadow
Hidden river singing
Road winding into the mountains.
This road with the colour of itself roams and dips from pink to purple to the brown of a hunting dog. Laid as a wish upon bucking stone, a river of hope for dry feet.
River song
Singing heart
Road into the mountains.
Hidden river
Singing heart
Road into the mountains
Each footstep song, a rhythm of itself repeating with breath and sight, the same view, the slightly changing view, the folding and unfolding view.
Sunlit meadow
Somewhere the river
Singing to itself
This meadow slope lighted with its own green, radiant aura, hovers between dark wood and bright water. A vacant illumined shimmer.
Empty mountain road
Winding beside a river
The sound of sheep
Sheep on the hillsides
Sunshine on the meadow
Empty road.
The mountain faces are copper and lead. They yearn, as mountains do, to fade to mysteries invisible, and clamber towards unreachable towering midnights.
The road and I
Following the sound of the river
Into the northern hills.
This narrow road
Wanders into the hills.
The sound of the river.
The river, a sound of laughing sunlight, uncatchable as eels. We know it by what it is not. The colour of sky and leaves and earth and rock.
Aimless we both wander,
The narrow road and I,
Into the northern hills.
Narrow road –
I do not mind where it leads
Following the river’s song.
These bare branched trees, hazel and alder and oak down there with the birches. Lines drawn across time. A language of balance and holding still. They float more certain than the solid ground.
It will be autumn soon.
The narrow road lost in leaves,
Winding beside the river.
Narrow road and I,
Forgetting where we are
Following the river into the hills.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, belonging, habit, interplay of ideas, landscape photography, Poetry, release, transformation, Wales on October 18, 2017| Leave a Comment »
—
DESCANT
Sullied though we are,
The earth shall take us back to itself.
They remain, these fading memories,
And the scudding light over far hills.
Certain is our fate, and always has been:
Summer moves graceful on winter’s bones,
The dancer and the music of the dance.
In desolate darkness is the night,
Where the ashes fall, where the pines fall,
Where the oaks fall, owl-filled, moth-filled
By the slightest light of speeding stars
Through a roaring of winds, the river mind speaks.
And in sunless cwm the shepherd’s house.
Brown light as thick as honey,
Walls sullen and the ticking clock.
An accumulation of sorrows and a life
Of small dissappointments nested in dust.
Belonging is the key to it all,
The only pause in a precipitous dream.
But clinging is not the same.
Wrapped around the web of memories,
Too rent and uncertain to give much comfort.
What is that name we have given ourselves?
And where was the road we turned off to get here?
I have forgotten the names of stars and trees,
And the clarity of goodness and of light.
Above all, I rely on whispers from clouds
And the words flowering from the oldest books.
For they glimmer, (do they not?) , with what has been lost.
All the doors stand open, as they ever have.
All the maps spread out and referenced.
All the ways well trod, all the paths tended.
Yet we move as if none have moved on before us
As if nothing else mattered so much or was so dear.
But the earth shall take us back to itself,
And we who can not forgive
Will be forgiven.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancient skin, awen, entrancement, Mabinogion, memory, mystery, photographic arts, Poetry, semblance, the holding spellart, third branch, Wales, yew landscape on September 23, 2017| 3 Comments »
—
THIRD BRANCH
In brown light, thick as honey,
A book of instruction lies open that is a door.
Listen now, listen to these pictures.
How the reckless, (and even those we once thought wise),
Rush after what has been lost.
Into the fortress of emptiness,
Into deserted palaces and courtyards calling, calling.
And how they, we, I, reach for a clear golden perfect thing
And in that moment become immovable, entranced,
The fountain of all life bubbling inches out of reach.
The golden chains, (each link a true remembering
Of the one before), disappearing up into eternal blue
That holds the perfect vessel, that is equally curse and blessing.
If it has but one clear meaning, then it is not our poetry.
(A vessel chased and engraved with hypnotic flow,
Imperfect symmetry of ripples on a summer stream.)
If we are not led astray, it is not our poetry.
If we do not forget ourselves, wondering how we came here,
What it may all mean, then it is not our poetry.
We shall become poisoned by it and purged by it,
Blessed by it and made full with it. Stripped of skin,
Made shining and given new names, the names of ghosts long gone.
For the truth is: it shall revive the dead, made perfect again but speechless.
Only through our own voices now can they wander this world,
And we haunt them as they inhabit us.
Memory and forgetfulness.
A patch of sunlight sweeps the hills
And is gone.
These clouds, these hymns, these voices.
For a moment we shall fly upward, then remembering,
Fall down once more below the soil.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged distance, landscape, memory, Poetry, time, Wales on September 21, 2017| 5 Comments »
This is how it is, or maybe.
(memory is a dark poetry,
old as clouds and as fickle.)
a mountain remembered:
golden and easy
and green in the evening.
this mountain leans into rain:
a glossolalia
of rivers.
this mountain:
lost for days in mist,
and dreaming.
this mountain cloak
draped over horizons,
cloud-shadowed,
bruised purple.
this mountain:
a joy to the stranger,
a burden to the desolate.
this mountain:
benign and warm
and sprinkled with sheep.
this mountain:
cairn-topped,
Its dead long gone
Into small things.
this mountain:
leaning skywards,
always growing upwards
mouthing hymns,
forgetting nothing.
this is how it is, or may be.
(memory becoming landscape,
too vast and folded for one glance).
evaporating our vocabularies,
a rearrangement of whispers.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, bibliomancy, context, experimentation, Haiku-ish, I Ching, interpretation, jutraposition, landscape photography, meaning, oracles, perception, Poetry, rain, storm, Wales, wind on September 11, 2017| 1 Comment »
Book of Changes
I
Wind river
Ocean airs
Clouds race
Birds watch
From shelter
With anchor feet.
Sounds stretched thin.
“The Creative is heaven.
It is round, it is the prince,
The father, jade, metal, cold, ice;
It is deep red, a good horse, a lean horse,
A wild horse, tree fruit.”
II
News from far off
Sorrow and treachery.
Collecting radish seeds
As they ripen
Between the rains.
“The great prince issues commands
Founds estates, vests families with fiefs.
Inferior people should not be employed.”
III
Dawn already in the east.
Rain in the west.
We wait for news, and names.
The kettle bubbles.
“The well. The town may be changed,
But the well cannot be changed.
It neither increases nor decreases.
They come and go and draw from the well.
If one gets down almost to the water
And the rope does not go all the way,
Or the jug breaks, it brings misfortune.”
IV
Standing still,
All the flock, backs turned
To the wind.
When the storm is over
The grass shall taste sweeter.
“Innocence. Supreme success.
Perseverance furthers.
If someone is not as he should be,
He has misfortune,
And it does not further him
To undertake anything.”
—
I recently picked up a copy of Richard Wilhelm’s “I Ching or book of changes”. I had it many years ago, and though it is probably not the best translation, it carries a certain, stately grandeur in its language. This morning, in stormy weather, I decided to see what happened combining a few short verses I had written with random selections from the book. Meaningless and meaningful. Everything becomes oracular. Juxtaposition revealing the mysteries of the mundane.
