DOWN THE VALLEY AND BACK
The Towey practices its slow, bright curves.
From a distance watch indulgent, guiding hills.
Coaxed to soft mudded shore, the quilted morning
And a pearly sea, we are a downward drift, and aimless.
Caught up in salt breeze, its notions taught by brick cliffed roads,
The red deserted, bleak-eyed, stuttered cities,
Crouched and stripped of worth and hard work,
Neutered by bigger plans, a thrombosis of roadworks.
Unformed, uniformed, scrubbed up, led away
To an anaesthetised future, one size fits all, a shabby lie.
—
The world is bone and snowdrops
A sketched slope of towsled brown.
Fields pressed down and drowned in pools,
Mired and marred.
Scribed by hawk the white grey sky,
A scatter for crows.
—
The Towey dives back
To its deep, delved loins,
An upper silence reconstituted
And holy, disembodied,
Become mist and dew,
An older language,
Petalled lilt,
A catalogue of sighing valleys,
Wooded oak and ash,
Forgiving and lean,
Slowly choired and gathering voice.
Skywards ( the distant sunlit views),
Scrubbed of green, a whiter shade,
The rain-washed road.
—
simonhlilly 
Llym awel. Verse 5 improvisations.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged action, ancient Welsh verse, art, block print design, commentary, improvisations, landscape, peace, Poetry, snow, the world, Wales, war, Welsh language, Winter on February 11, 2015| 4 Comments »
LLYM AWEL verse 5 Improvisations.
Ottid eiry, guin y cnes;
Nid a kedwir oè neges;
Oer llinneu, eu llyu heb tes.
“Falls the snow, a white covering;
Warriors shun their tasks.
Cold are the lakes, their colour without warmth.”
Each line ends with a long hissing sibilance, the fall of snow, the melt as cold hits warm. The slightly longer last line elaborates the terse imagery and is a lack, draining motion and warmth from the reader’s mind.
The description of ‘warriors’ could be ironic. How strong and brave are they really, who refuse to go out in the snow? Or, in another view, the snow can vanquish even the bold warrior with its implacable purpose.
—
So falls and falls the snow.
White covers all, all senses white.
No colour for the sight,
No sound nor note to the ear,
All feeling numbed, no warmth here for heart.
The stalwart shrink, the warriors shirk,
The brave turn away, tasks undone.
Huddled small to the fire, faces inward.
For the lakes stretch vast and cold.
Their colour is death and grey pallor,
A wan weight the white drift sinks to.
Extirpated, extinguished, cold on cold.
Drained is the heat of war,
We are rendered aimless,
Lost to thoughtless staring peace.
We fall to not doing,
A sin for man whose fuse
Runs short and hot.
Severed, spun back, reeled in.
Conquered by an easy drift
And silent fall –
A world unbudged,
Resolute in is.
A cold refusal.
A cold covering.
—
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