Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Mari Lwyd, photography, Poetry, tradition, Wales on January 15, 2017| Leave a Comment »
MARI LWYD 3
We follow sightless bones
Through the narrow door into a New Year
Because white bones and sightless eyes
Are the only things ever to pass through
From now to the future.
The wise will wander aimlessly,
Lost, discussing the dark paths, the short cuts,
The less muddy way.
We will stumble drunk and aimless
And find the warm door
And ask the right question
And fall to sleep
As the voices laugh
And roar
And the light
Slowly rises and fades.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, landscape, Mari Lwyd, mystery, photography, poerty, the past, tradition, unknown, Wales on January 15, 2017| Leave a Comment »
MARI LWYD 2
Sparks spin into night.
Through darkness a white ghost moves.
We follow, laughing.
Landscape remains.
Mind stays the same.
It is only the light
That changes,
Only thoughts
That come and go.
The music of it all
Remains,
Though the notes
Are constantly rearranged.
This dream so real
We fear there is no other.
We follow the grey empty void
For which we have made sparkling eyes
And a name and a thunderous roar;
And filled it with questions and answers,
Sustaining itself in darkness,
Intruding into our hearth.
Skull empty judge,
Bent bone and curved empty,
A void of time.
Lacerating tattered hearts
The wind that scars the hills
And incrementally erodes
Once warm moments
Wearing down words to screams,
Wisdom to leaden clubs.
A white sky.
Snow cold are the hills.
The rain freezes.
Beauty is not for you to survive,
But to savour
And then to long for forever.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Mari Lwyd, New Year, photography, Poetry, the numinous, tradition, Wales on January 15, 2017| Leave a Comment »
A sequence of connected works, or variations, to do with Time, New Year, tradition and mysteries. The Mari Lwyd, (‘Grey Mare’) is a horse’s skull decorated and carried on a long pole that goes round houses on New Year’s Eve exchanging banter for food and drink. It seems like a really ancient tradition and has the edgy, initiatory, feel of the oldest of memories.
Part One
MARI LWYD
A fluid darkness, a slow river wind.
Wild torches taste change, sparks tumbling into tomorrow.
We follow laughing, the Mari Lwyd with the wild futures
As all before have done this New Year’s Eve in the old valleys
Lost in the darkness, these hills watching, loomed.
Following the Grey Mare who tests the wit and want,
And begs for food and the oblivious warmth of drink,
To remember and forget the fading paths, the slender chance,
The fatal message.
A laconic nightmare stirred up for a vigilance and a testing,
Slick and breathed upon with frost death, breath white sheet cloud,
An ectoplasmic emission, the dancing myth of earth,
A decay and return of Time to its rightful round.
Not a horse of this world, patient in the paddock.
A night horse, all will ride willy-nilly,
And a rough ride or a wild drunk banter.
We ride the words, we ride the stories, into the night.
The torches are well made, but will still gutter and die in dawn’s drizzle.
Mari Lwyd is mute this year – no wit left amongst these sundered tribes,
No one can recite the triads, utter the names of things, the innuendo beneath the sheet.
We rake over ashes, but for want of fuel the fires will die
(And perhaps they should, perhaps they should).
A new fire, the valley snaking north, caught glorious in a winter dawn.
The light slides deep, across pale oaks and forest boughs,
Slides with shifting cloud across the tops, across the fields.
The bones of things dressed in warmth,
But it is only the bones of things that will ever pass
Through and along and between the long nights,
And into the death and birth of years.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, cold morning, dawn, landscape, landscape photography, mist, mountains, nature, Poetry, Wales, Winter on December 31, 2016| 14 Comments »
Ice Breath
Is it not true
That it is always the past
We burn to keep ourselves warm?
The young sun
Is on the tops now,
The deep valleys shadowed,
The mists let go, rise and melt away.
One slow hawk
Skims the treetops.
The cold, still sky
Has yet to choose its colour.
Ice will soon breathe,
relax to water,
Struck by the
warm weight
of light.
Those
that have survived
the night
Will stir
and sing.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, bards, landscape, landscape photography, Poetry, tradition, Wales on November 19, 2016| 2 Comments »
Hills behind
There are hills behind the hills,
Words behind the words.
Clouds of understanding billow up
Then dissolve to fog.
The old words, the mountain words,
The river words –
No matter how fast you move,
You can never catch up with them.
The old words,
They have the deepest roots.
We sit by the forest edge,
Sky and grasses and the sallow dell.
Starlings shift and rise
From field to field.
Their patterns weave small tongues,
Bright eyes.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn frosts, Haiku, ivy, landscape, Poetry, Wales, woods on November 3, 2016| 2 Comments »
frost scratched morning air.
in each green nest of ivy
Grateful bees murmur.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged annwfn, art, bardic, cycles, First Branch, gnomic, landscape photography, Mabinogion, mystery, overlay, Poetry, reflection, Rhiannon, the Deep, the Hidden, translucence, Wales, Welsh literature on October 24, 2016| 5 Comments »
Rhiannon’s Riddle
These my bare branches,
These the days of moonlit silence.
Seven are the ones lost to sleep
That should have been watchful
That should have been truthful.
A claw of cloud has stolen
my golden light, my golden sun.
I am sunk down by it and sullied,
Weighed by each retelling.
Bound again by careless generosity,
Bound by those not blameless.
An open honesty shall allay my worry,
And watchful bravery and a clear discrimination.
The hunter has risen and taken my firstborn light.
I am become wolf tied to stone,
Wandering the same road
Weighed down by it.
At night, the high table of the feast.
Neither here, neither there,
This road of travail, this cloak of flesh.
Golden is the harvest moon,
Birdsong of the morning.
All is fog
And my bright boy is gone.
The son eaten by the mother,
The mother deceived by her sisters
The hunter and his prey, taken, restored.
Pay attention Pwyll!
What is yours, is illusion.
Deeper by far is the world you walk.
My heartache is in this coming and going,
Half the time here, half the time
In a somewhere else,
more, or less, reflected perfect.
I will wait for you though.
Wait another year on year.
You shall only need to ask,
Only listen.
The footsteps beneath the ground,
The silver paths.
It shall all find return.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, annwfn, art, awen, bards, landscape, landscape photography, Mabinogion, Poetry, Wales on October 21, 2016| 2 Comments »
br />
these old poets:
smoke blue hills,
smoke blue clouds.
they rise up so,
they reveal themselves
and are curiously hidden,
conversing with vapour
between worlds
unmeasured, unfathomable.
they loom, nonetheless,
and shape the world.
it is from there
the clear waters fall,
from fell and moor
to feed, to wash clear our eyes,
to fill with song untranslateable,
echoing down the spine,
deeper than eye and brain,
deeper than soul,
into the bowels,
into annwfn,
the dark mysterious,
fecund deep.
rolling, these storm fast vowels,
ancestral to the blood.
this they prove:
there are no new songs.
just old songs
with new words,
old songs
with new tunes.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged axis, centre, chapel, graveyard, in memory of, landscape photography, Poetry, the dead, Wales on October 15, 2016| 4 Comments »
AR GOF 2 (past and future fragments)
Here lies this small enclosure,
this square of grass
And stone and hidden bone.
Here is the centre of it all
Silent and weeping and keeping tally.
From whence the landscape spreads out,
To where the past and future repairs
With aching knees and a clutch of flowers
And a hollow dream of howling wings
And a due certaintly that nothing will escape it.
What all shun they have embraced-
A domed silence in the earth,
A renunciation of edge and owning.
They surely hold to the habit of time and space for a while.
Outside, looking in, leaning back on emotions familiar,
A slow encroaching magnanimity of forgetfulness, a turn
Towards the cosmological, a more geological topography.
Becoming as light as willowherb,
floating breezewards down to the river.
A spinning wheel on singing axle,
A moonlight and a sunlight thread.
The fabric of things woven here,
inextricable mysteries we are ghosts between,
Caring not a moment to consider the seen nor unseen.
—-
It comes out from desolation on desert wind with a jealous stare
And has been dressed in robes of love
but knows better by far the hearts of men,
The weight of righteousness and of history and of glory unquestioned.
It builds upon the grey and certain unforgivingness of stone.
It chides and chivvies with heavy prophecy the call to war.
It is nothing less than storm on the mountain side, blizzard in the orchard.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Autumn, Haiku, nature, October, Poetry, Wales on October 13, 2016| 4 Comments »
october mornings
crows calling
gold drifts to ground
the smell of hills
pillow wind stills
crow echoes crow
falling golden
river road
car sighs by
clouds pile higher
Slow dawn tints all
hills mist and unfurl
then fade again
jackdaws’ monkey chant
a circle of clapping children
drums for good harvest
and kind winter
—
