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Posts Tagged ‘Wales’

This land,
The land of the dead,
A second skin, translucent,
Golden.

At the centre of each apple,
The sign of love:
The fivefold mutable, son and mother.

Over mountains a cream and violet fog,
Rolled, undulous, attentively folds.
A mysterious union,
Somewhat secret and holy.

The sky, a long vowel, holding its light.
A fluent time,
A tickled, breezeless sigh.
Not so still as to be nothing.

For the tiny roar
Of valley trees, a whispered thing
Measuring miles.

Vaporous drop,
Drip, congealed,
A reflected skin of nothing,
A silver round fruit,
Womb, belly, dream.

This skin
Is our beautiful horizon,
An inner organ.
Our own birdsong:
A poetic heart.

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GATHER YE

Stealthy as a cat
Night stalks a low moon.

A philosophy of cloud and rain,
A savoured language
Where trees and rocks
Become long, slow vowels.

The wet and fallen tongues
Of petalled roses
Cleaved to bough and path
Melting into something else.

Into the night,
Peeling words
From shape of vastness
And the thick, still silence,

While this world’s half
Dreams and settles down
In a bed of time and skittered light.

Cool along with the living
And the dead, all equal
In shadowed starlight

A tide of slight passions.
Rolling tongue, a roaring
Back and forth

But not so near
As to quell
The simple comfort
Of flecked
And flickered night.

Within its quiet purr
The padding cats
And careful mice
And white flow
Of owls

And the eternal rope river
Hurrying down the valley,
Tree-clothed and glorious.

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Swathed, mist cool
Tasting blue dawn
As still as an egg

Hushed as only August can be
Held in a lap of seasons
Replete, ripening,
Remembered now
The bite that is frost,
The gradual fall inwards.

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veiled
though we sleep
dream or wake.

the world wrapped
in its own light
soaked in whispered
breath.

a fountain of waters
a tree, a river,
wondrous emergent

a circular thing
a pearl gently
warmed in fire,

dawn misted,
floating.

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BHUH BHUVAH SVAH

the river of sleep:
not quite song
not quite words,
a murmur continuing.

i have climbed
from the river of sleep
to the river of dawn:
not quite song,
not quite a speaking,
a slow unfolding moment
tasting, somewhat, something.

the river of day:
a strong river is its dream,
a shout of song,
a babble, a chant.
the valley grows clear,
the mountains recede.

the river mind meanders,
silk in the valley of light
to the gayatri metre,
a blue rhythm ornamented
jewelled,
to one infinite presence.

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Sure of this Sorley has spoken
His sweet scouring gravel words
Pure paced, precise grey grinding stones
Pouring splendid golden grain,
Eloquence of earth.

Though few have heard
Or paid him heed.
Old, tweeded, sharp-eyed scholar
Wandered, windblown on
Steep lined western shores
Between deserted croft
And sand-scoured macha.

His mountains named
One by one,
His steadings remarked,
His memories buried safe,
All buried under stone,
The language of remaining
Despite scorn and spittle.

A path half-made
Through hillside rocks,
The prints of deer,
Silence is the heather.
These winds whistle
Through an empty heart.
These words, a whisky
For the tongue that is parched,
A decent medicine
Against the clean sin
Of city streets,
Their promise to forget
Cold and weather,
An unceased consumption
Of time and art and loveliness.

Without the cry of curlew
Without the wheeling hoodie
Without the slap of salt wind
We think ourselves gods
Who are short, soft animals
One moment from bleached oblivion.

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TWO BY BEULAH

1
A break in the cloud:
A mouth of light
Drifts slowly over Beulah.
Dawn cannot be long.

Bats flicker vision,
A fluttering heartbeat.
Warm air, rain-wet
And rose-heavy.

2
The road sways soft
Down to Beulah.

Drowsy with valerian,
Hammocked easy
On sweet drift meadowsweet.

Awake the spired, serry willowherb,
And betony: scatter of exclamation.

We float light upon
Our own bright shadows.
The afternoon sun
And cloud valleys singing.

The road down to Beulah
Under the mountain.

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Under a silent sky
Stretched with cloud,
Grasses loll green and pink and grey.

A firmament of birdsong
Curled, woven to sift shading green.

Tractors sigh and roar down the lanes.
Fields turned now and mown.

Stay quiet, stay still a while,
Hear how the river mumbles.

Fed we are,
Appeased by the width of things:

The deep caverned wood,
The slow, fine rains,
Flowers, now, of cloud.

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A lovely mist
Swaddles and swathes,
Dissolving the ground.

The chant of it –
An ululation of hilltops,
A thin taste of cloud.

The silent morning,
A slow rolling light,
A gentlest breeze,
A river ripple.

A high
And abandoned moon
Sings up the sun.

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A ROAR OF SUMMER

Of what shall we sing
In the ringing silence,
In the hushed ocean forest,
In the crow morning?
These ghost words haunt
The sway and shift,
The weight or lightness of moments,
The scented full and falling roses.
How can, how shall, the shifting pulse,
The dark and light cloud,
Stray highly, voiced onwards?
The dead sigh, roaring in the winds,
Rasp in the trees.
Their songs push and spin this world,
(As we might hope to
For ears that strain in summer dawn,
For futures and reasons and signs
To hope for goodness and good dreams).
The limp honeysuckle, the weaving bee,
A masked eternal glowing.
To be shriven and rid of this
Wasteland drab, dulled down leaden.
A golden storm is coming.
Hush. Summer’s engine.
The smallest cloud
Is greater than all this.
The light rain from the hills
Shall send us deep sleep.
The dreaming ear
Catch, but not hold,
An answer.
We are not what we were,
Nor shall be.
A pall, lifted.
Edges blur in oncoming rain.
We shall become slaked,
Unquestionably whole,
Purely hollow,
Of lightness and vast,
Perhaps,perhaps.

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