Posted in Uncategorized, tagged landscape, Poetry, Wales on March 26, 2017| Leave a Comment »
TRANSIENT 7
Were it to remember itself
In a million years
It would dream these
Mists and valleys
Wondering were they real.
And like a song sung in sleep
The birdsong drifting from
Each white hollow
And the rippled hilltops
Coming and going
And the hills and fields
Lying so green and glorious
And the slow rain
The slow rain.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Classical Indian music, early spring, Haiku, Haiku-ish, landscape, light, Mid Wales, mystery, Poetry, Wales on March 23, 2017| 1 Comment »
>br />
PAKAD: CLOUDLESS SILENCE
It is a cloudless silence, a stretched skin of light,
White wheel of sun and moon, stars silver singing road,
Painted vast and edgeless, the deep rolling earth
Breathing in hills, dreaming in valleys.
Cloudless silence here
White light pierces winter mind.
The tumbling waters
Cloudless silence here
Lost in mist, crow calls its mate.
Cold air, dogs barking.
Cold breeze shifts the mist
Dogs bark in the distant town.
A cloudless silence
In cloudless silence
All these thoughts fall silent now.
Footsteps on the road.
A delicate touch
Keeping warm this egg of words.
New cloudless silence.
Three crows dancing song
Cold breeze on the snowcapped hill.
A cloudless silence.
Pakad, jor, alap.
A slow unfolding morning.
This cloudless silence.
—
A pakad is a theme in Classical Indian music. It is a short series of notes that identifies and characterises every raag. It appears and reappears throughout each piece of music. It is a constant moment of return to mood and purpose.
Alap is the slow development and investigation of the note sequences of a raag, a discovery of themes.
Jor is the section that continues the development within a more rhythmical framework.
</em
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, changing light, dawn, landscape, light, Mid Wales, photography, Poetry, skies, spring, Wales on March 17, 2017| 2 Comments »
TRANSIENT 5
A day of slow skies
Testing new brightnesses.
Cwm Dwfnant is lost
In dreams of cloud once more.
In the green centre
The river whispers
And the crows feel that
Spring is near now, over the hills,
And sunlight, too,
In the slate and stately rise and exhale.
A sleeping world,
Dreaming of waking,
Dreaming of a small unfolding.
—
TRANSIENT 6
Tinder, the horizon.
Laid just so
With blue on blue
To catch spark and roar
Come sunrise.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, dawn, landscape photography, light, Poetry, spring, Wales on March 12, 2017| 2 Comments »
Transient (4)
Skies of palest violet,
An uninhabited eye
Whose souls are words.
An unimaginable wind
Blows light in waves
across the hills.
Like heaven,
the snowfields rise above,
Hardly visible, their glimmering.
A village of daffodils sways.
The jackdaws freefall in joy.
There is ice in the buckets
And all the farms roar with fires
For the lads and lasses hunched
With cold hands
From a long night’s lambing.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged a certain Welsh Dylan, art, landscape photography, Poetry, Wales on March 7, 2017| Leave a Comment »
The words
of the sea
Roaring drunk
And glorious
in endless sunlight.
He has squeezed through
regardless,
Touching the soon
And the many.
He knows that
Poetry is
not the words.
Words
are what remains
When poetry has flown.
Flown like a bomb,
like a sunrise,
In all directions,
too great for human kind,
But not the soul,
singing, silent, watching
In endless birth,
the reason beyond itself.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged landscape.landscape photography, light, Llansteffan church, movement, Poetry, rain, spring, storm, Wales on February 25, 2017| 4 Comments »
TRANSIENT 1
This day
So full
Of veils and doors.
Rain-washed, wind-swept,
Metal bright:
Cold hills, copper burnished;
sky walls swagged and pewter blue.
Rivers fast and thick as soup,
Wavetopped, roiled, cascading down.
Pulpit trees proclaiming
Spring is near, but not yet.
Radiant light and broken rainbows,
And the scattered white heads of snowdrops
Praising the quiet corners,
And the drunken roar
Of storm winds.
—
TRANSIENT 2
Rain curtains the valley.
Like the dead
The hills are invisible
But still with us
(Breathing different air,
Dreaming slow, deep dreams).
Hymn-makers come from here,
Praisers of the Intangible.
(The hawk’s cry and the
Sighing grasses and the
Oaks in the lee of the wind.)
It is a short enough life
Not to sing out praise,
Not to wonder at it,
Not to search out the right words
And the tune of the soul-
A counterpoint to the heart-
And the rhythm of footsteps
Down the winding roads.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged burial ground, Cefn Gorwydd, deep ecology, landscape photography, life, Poetry, synergy, transformation, Wales, yew tree on February 16, 2017| 2 Comments »
Gathered In
There in its branches
All the dead are gathered.
And there they sing,
Bright as ivy berries
Whilst angels, like winter wasps,
Sip grateful and murmur
a psalm of houses.
There is this, and nothing but this:
A gathered slow change
From one, shared endlessly with the other,
Wrapped and stretched,
Wriggled and feathered.
A rope of souls arcing
The deep between lonely stars.
And the slow pools,
And the fast river of seconds
Washed away-
Breathed in, breathed out,
And in the silences between:
The wind in the dry leaves
And the creak of limbs
Tangled from rusted iron rails,
And shattered blooms of stone
And words in an old tongue:
Here lies, in memory of, the memory,
The memory itself.
One that was, gone now beyond crumbled edges,
Melted skin, up to the snowline,
Down to the river pastures.
Gone to the hairy down-soft snakes of ivy;
The hard, blood-thin flakes of yew;
The bitter tang of elder, caught right there
At the back of the throat;
The delightful bruised scent of ground-ivy
And the small violet day.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Cambrian Mountains, distance, Elenydd, landscape photography, Poetry, silence, space, uplands, Wales on February 8, 2017| 2 Comments »
Sunlight and whispers,
Bright rolling silence.
There is no confusion here:
All things fall fearless
Against the movement
And the stillness
Of hours and their dust.
Footsteps all forgotten
(Puddle, pool, stream, river)
Nothing but the distance of the past
And the distance of the future
(And the skylark remembering both).
The diagonal slide of sun and moon and stars,
Tides of light and shade,
The constant abrasion of the wind.
It hardly breathes, so still it is
In its rising and falling distances.
The silent rolling hills of heaven.
These uplands spread out
Like God’s own hands
On the first Sunday,
Sun-warmed skin stretched pale
Over rippled knuckles,
Bone resting quiet,
Muscle and tendon singing.
Sky-touched, the first moments,
Cloud thoughts, the pale waving grasses,
This click of warming rock.
—-
The Elenydd is the old name for the central uplands of Mid Wales, known as the Cambrian Mountains. The southern border is effectively the Irfon Valley, where I live, though in actual fact the valley is bordered on its other edge by the Mynnedd Epynt, a very similar landscape.
The Elenydd is a very ancient mountain range worn down to a high bog and grassland plateau cut deeply by streams and rivers
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Imbolc, landscape photography, Mid Wales, morning, Poetry, the seasons, time, Wales, Winter on February 5, 2017| 5 Comments »
Time slides as the seasons slide,
One into the other.
As the sun slides and the moon slides.
Time slides as the days slide,
Toppling over and over,
Rolling as the sun rolls, as the stars roll.
Garn Goch is covered in cloud again.
A slow drift, wordless love.
Seeds of rivers, seeds of seas,
Collecting on the stiff sedge
That lodges between the tumbled rock.
All slides on,
A smooth falling dance
Through winter, through spring,
Through summer.
A green slide and a grey slide,
Sun and rain.
A slow smoke rises, offered.
River mist: opaque as snow, radiant.
And the calligraphy of oaks.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, mystery, New Year, Poetry, the liminal, time, tradition, Wales on January 15, 2017| Leave a Comment »
MARI LWYD 4
This dream we cling to
As if it were the only dream.
This wind, these hills,
This heart so tattered,
So threadbare.
Scoured even,
Stretched thin,
Worn down.
A whisper in the rain.
A word forming in the pines.
Winter shows the bones
Of what is, of what
Will remain,
Of what the old songs sung.
This has been your life
Down to this frozen moment,
This darkening path,
Distant laughter,
Sparks spinning
From the bobbing torches.
Shall we go on?
