Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ambience, art, Beulah, green, june, landscape photography, light, midsummer, Poetry, silence, twilight, Wales, woods on June 27, 2017| Leave a Comment »
MIDSUMMER LIGHT
The woods are settled now and full.
Their heavy green skirts spread cool
And pleated in each valley’s green lap.
Nest and nested, crowned with shade,
They glow of a midsummer evening
Into a slow, white bow of twilight
Patterned with bats and owls,
A stretched and quiet expanse,
The tropic and declination of invisible motion,
A singular silvered attendance upon silence.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, landscape, landscape photography, Poetry, rain, summer, Wales on June 12, 2017| Leave a Comment »
SPITE INN
June settles in,
Warm and fine and easy.
Beyond Spite Inn
Clouds roll through the wet grasses.
Two cuckoos praise each other
Across the oak valley floor.
The old roads drip green.
—
Spite Inn is a ruined, but preserved, building on the road between Tirabad and Cyngordy on the northern slopes of the Eppynt. It is likely a drover’s resting place, and its name is thought to derive from its rivalry with another nearby inn.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Abergwesyn, art, june, landscape, mist, photography, Poetry, rain, Wales on June 8, 2017| 2 Comments »
JUNE DRIFT
I am as blurred as the cleft of Cwm Dwfnant shrugged with cloud,
shunned in its darkness, up hanging from the heights, silent as a hawk.
like ladders the thistles grow, straight and high, and the sedges hustle
the grasses, cropped short, and rain-laden.
the woods, a hushed audience, wait for rain
that is as welcome as the sun, as welcome as the long, pale dawns,
as welcome as the naked starlit evenings.
sallow seed slides and drifts, amnesiac angels, bounced on warm air,
and shallow cool down by the gurgling river’s bank.
and the globeflowers at Nant Y Bran bursting and butter-bright as suns
on their long green necks. and yet they still cannot look into tomorrow.
where shall be ever planted the sweet heads of valerian
and the meadowsweet foaming up through the coming of another summer.
light drizzle rains down, slowly drifting east. a cuckoo mist, a cuckoo silence.
I am blurred as the sources of all rivers are, nominal, approximate.
this white drift is a moment that now dissolves the hills
and clarifies by shimmer and shade the valley’s deep and every fold.
the unknown and the known are not new dreams to us.
they clothe us and wrap us round, swaddled and held still, a long lullaby,
sometimes with words, sometimes with sounds,
sometimes with a warm breath
that is itself no different than love.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, landscape, landscape photography, May, mist, nature, Poetry, rain, Wales on June 5, 2017| 3 Comments »
These blurred, cool days are best,
Soaked with fresh green airs
Hedgerows smudged with bluebells,
Cowslip clouds lolling heavy in the grass
And the rivers running brown and full
Over hollows and heaped grey rock.
And everywhere the blackbirds sing
On wooded slopes,
And the flit and flick of swallows
In the slow rain.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Dinas, existence, landscape, landscape photography, Poetry, Wales on May 30, 2017| 1 Comment »
We are only a dream here to dream.
An exhalation of hill and forest.
A fancy of slab rock and weeds.
A drift of fog taken shape then dissipated.
Hardly even a thing, hardly a name.
A point of reference to a moment, green and eternal.
This field of dream, this song thrush stilled,
This fall of light rain, this cool dissolution,
This river breath.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged landscape, light, Mid Wales, Poetry, quietness, Sunday morning, Wales on May 28, 2017| Leave a Comment »
A cuckoo’s voice
rides the undulations
of the day.
Hardly a breath of wind,
but it will come on to rain later.
Sunday morning sun pushing towards brightness,
fades through lazy layered atmospheres.
The roads are quiet.
In an hour or two
the tourists will arrive
to see what life is all about.
They will whisper by,
Pass through in clean cars
and return tonight
to their city sleep,
Dreams of emptiness
and birdsong.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged as it is, landscape, MidWales, Poetry, politics, spring, Wales on May 12, 2017| Leave a Comment »
How the cuckoos sing sweetly
Of treachery and loss.
In the dewy morning
The rivers run low,
The hills to themselves,
Quietly weeping.
Ravens are joking on their way
To the slaughter-fields.
They do not need
The permission of gods
To be satisfied and at peace.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Gwyn ap Nydd, haunted spaces, inspiration, language, may day, mayday, mond, myth, Poetry, reading, silence, song, the gathering of souls, the numinous, voices, Wales, words on May 5, 2017| 1 Comment »
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?
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birds, Buddhism, cosmic balance, Haiku-ish, invocation, landscape, Poetry, praise, protectors, ritual, shinto, Sound, Tao, Wales, Wang Wei on April 29, 2017| 7 Comments »
THE SENDING AWAY OF NEGATIVE ENERGIES
One, two, three.
The thrush in the ash:
Vast mantra of space,
His bell voice and dorje bill.
Phurba crow
Struts alert amongst the dreaming sheep.
He stabs the ground
With a pure vision.
Silence as the clouds build to rain.
Taiko in the hills.
Lorry dungchens drone
On the valley road.
My ears are pierced with golden words.
Golden dust is in my eyes.
Golden smoke arises from horizon altar.
The Will of Heaven, unfathomable
As ever.
Some say there are stories to tell,
Some say stories to disprove.
In every hedge a blackbird rattles alarm,
Though there is nothing to fear.
Who has the shell as blue as sky?
The robin, I think.
Its white eternal arc
Is the world turned inside out.
Lying unnoticed, fallen from the chapel hawthorn.
A ruse to escape death.
Like shinto priests
The magpies strut with care the chapel roof.
They enunciate name and place
And the desires of each supplicant.
Hop and bow, hop and bow,
And call aloud to the spirits
Who will listen.
Whilst the domed mountain
Rests in Wang-Wei
And Wang-Wei rests in the mountain.
The ghosts of words stretched thin,
Their lips unsure whether to cry or smile,
But that is the nature of prayer and praise.
The whines of the psalmist irritating the gods
To distraction.
Give a little thought to the little things,
The wriggling life stepped upon unseen.
The unconcerned hosts, the vast inconsequential
Upon whom you rest.
The threads wear thin,
The seed unhurried.
A syllable breath forms
In the river’s mouth.
Never quite uttered.
Never quite understood.
We have not enough silence,
Not enough pause to continue here long.
From the dimpled, starry horizons
The Protectors gather.
What shall they deem worthy,
And what destroyed?
It is not a trick question.
But there is no answer.
—
simonhlilly 