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Posts Tagged ‘Wales’

SUMMER DROUGHT

Here is the slow, curdled froth of midsummer.
The drift downstream through wilted greens
And the drying grass, sallow on pocked, lain rock.
Parched flaccid, pressed still in irremovable heat
Sun-ironed shadows and a dull buzz of flies.

DARK MOON RIVER

Dark moon
river runs eyeless.
pools star-filled and silent

then dawn in honey cherry ink
stretched, spun silent,
a planet’s edge mating space

though most are dreaming
so miss the wide breath of beginning

a placid fire before an invention of green
all blue it is, and utter peace,
and the mist, like smoke, hangs upon the hills.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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SONG OF THE LORRIES

Through an open window
The song of the lorries
Pushing up the hill,
Their rumbling voices
And whistling lungs.

When they have passed-
The chant of the thrush,
Praising the god of sunlight
And feathers.

And this sky,
The colour of bluebells.

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