Song of Bran

VOYAGE OF BRAN (1)

For what reason

Does she call the Raven King,

Arcing over the waters to a safe land?

She is wedded to the song, blossom and fruit,

Calling from afar.

No matter where we turn

The music is invisible.

It sinks so deep that we sleep

And see what we cannot see,

Wish what we cannot know,

Set sail in hope on small boats,

Our lives no longer holding us

On their certain courses.

Cast adrift to find joy,

To measure it and move on

As the visions shift

And prophecies grow stronger.

We, in turn, become more, and less,

Floating above, sinking below.

The Raven sung by love to rest.

And restless shall they be

With and without this world.

The taste of the tree,

Never quite enough.

Never seen again,

Melting into the music.

Oh! Silver Branch!

–

VOYAGE OF BRAN 2

I turn back to see the future,

To see what has been missed.

A silver rent sings across the sky,

Laughter that only a world can make.

I know we dream, but do not know how to awaken,

Or if it is wise.

Water birds are screaming lies,

Hearts sink deeper into permafrost.

The smudge of sneers on too many faces.

Truth that was struggling is dead.

Best not to speak at all.

Let the world in, though,

That impossible branch of song,

To new pathways, new biologies.

Look back.

Has it not all been written of before?

BRYN

.

BRYN

Bryn does not care

Whether it is ice or storm.

It does not care which angry voice

Strides the world to call for war.

It rises as it always has

Making a horizon towards heaven,

Feeling the deep, slow pulse of the seasons

That is the heartbeat of the earth.

Feeling the downward blessings of rain

That trickles its poetry through

Heather root and bracken arch.

Bryn, that is no name at all.

Singing itself to itself.

The throne, the Elders, the Hosts,

The shining voice, itself to itself.

Holding its counsel, abiding in silence,

Resting alone. An island above the mists,

Above the green glow, moving the stars

And giving each its shelter

In its own dark womb.

.

Crooked One

CROOKED ONE

.

Naked and moist am I

Burning with stars.

A sickle swept low

Severing chance.

Tongues silenced

Their excuses full,

The stories tedious,

Revealed as smoke.

One deep dark eye

That measures worth

Unblinking.

I bend slow and low

Gathering up and binding.

The web tied and untied

Between all things

That tastes of poetry

But is seed and blood.

Unmannered, hungry,

The world shall taste it

And be changed forever

We demean ourselves with pretty gods.

Lessen the glory of the pulse of life.

Fail to stretch beyond the familiar,

Discard the chance for conflagration.

A passionate average, a mean measurement,

A judicial lack of vision.

The wild world dances,

So we turn away to sink

To meagre cooling gruel from yesterday.

.

Cailleach Says

CAILLEACH SAYS

.

This is what the

Cailleach says:

I have outlived you,

Outlived the fighting men

With their angry religions,

Their need to keep memory to themselves.

I have forgotten the years, forgotten even my names,

Forgotten all the homes belonging to myself and my daughters.

I walk about, best you if you challenge me.

I do not care that you live or die

Because you shall live and die.

Myself, my daughters, somehow

Avoiding the slaughter, avoiding the bombs,

Avoiding the pious, unholy glory of it all.

Living here and there, bringing luck,

Bringing healing,

Bringing you down-to-earth.

Where are we now?

I am the smoky one, the drift of smoke

Through your desolate city,

The ragged one, the forgotten one

Who cares for the small things,

Who teaches my daughters

To bend and survive, to make bread,

To give milk, to circle around edges,

To pick up the pieces that remain.

The thieves will come,

The do-good priests with their tall tales,

And the old men with their aches and jibes,

And the farmers with their complaints,

And the wind with its news of another war

Made by men.

And we shall remain,

Ragged, unnamed, silent, alone.

Us and our daughters

Holding on to the world.

With our keening and our shroud-clothes.

Waiting to wash the bones clean.

Waiting for goodness to be noticed.

The storm washes clean the slaughter-stone.

Moonlight on the darkening path.

.

UPLANDS (5): upward soaring voice

It flowers with the breath,

Unfurls like a fern on the hill.

A cuckoo thing from somewhere else,

Desiring to belong, to be heard.

A voice rumbling with thunder,

A hiss of rain, a roar of wave,

A keening of curlew.

Nothing new, though,

nothing new can ever be said.

Before the flocks, before the engines,

Before the need to be somewhere else.

Kite and buzzard wheeled high above here.

On their upward soaring voice,

The voice of moving, warmed airs.

With vision open, fixed on hope,

Their hunger to remain.

Insistent is the voice of a silent land,

Holding those who care, to stand still a while to hear.

From the ground, and from beneath that,

It will rise up in its own time.

An uncurling, a reaching thread,

A line of a melody,

A translucent tusk of language.

In the waters, between field and wood;

In the moments, as cloud shades and passes;

Before certainty and after doubt;

A voice weighs and judges its own worth.

The verses shall all bow down, bright-browed.

Prophecy is the love-child of thought.

Lost souls, reborn, eager to take flight again.

The root of my tongue is locked to a syllable of light.

A spark electric, a leap between precipitous cliffs:

The long darkness of being, the long darkness of non-being.

A slim, swaying golden chain

Rising up to eternity,

Sinking to iron-cold oceans.

It shall not cease til it ceases,

Takes breath, and speaks again:

The whispering of rock and stream and soil.

A mother’s voice, never lost.

UPLANDS: Where it begins

UPLANDS (4)

(Where it begins)

It is the mind (is it not?), that weaves the stuttered fragments

Of our own experiencing?

That makes a seamless landscape of sense, a fabricated clarity.

A story with fitting beginning, middle, end.

Hammocked between void and void we taste our own landscapes

In sweet and bitter.

Just so, we see the vast uplands there, rising smooth and even, up to heaven,

And do not feel the weight of mind, do not strain against the uneven road,

Do not catch breath at the long slopes, the impossible tussocked miles,

The scouring winds, the hungry rains.

We hold the truth of dream against the storm of tangled life.

The stories of the heroes, the builders, the survivors.

The steady, solid ones. Not the wrecked bodies, not the broken fingers,

Not the minds locked fast in relentless, ruthless faith.

Not the worn down, gap-toothed, corrugated, rusted.

Not the sightless windows. Not the tumbled walls.

Not the lichen-eaten names on tilted stone,

In ground once holy, now deserted.

Unhomed, we long for the home over there, in that heavenly blue gradient

Where peace must surely lie, a rippling shroud of psalm and skylark.

It sinks down. It all sinks down.

Covered, transformed in secret, wrapped in lightless pools,

Sucked dry by jealous peat.

This is where it begins, where life becomes holy, unnamed,

Ready to flow down into the valleys, green and sheep-scattered.

This is where the mulch is ground into futures,

And futures return to the past, and small things take control

Once and for all.

A gravel rain hits the windows in the valley.

The fire roars, fed with a world’s hungry breath.

We long, still, to be there: in the uplands of clear certainty.

Drained of doubt, stripped clean by simple necessity to go on,

Caressed by the wild that tests our bones:

The truth and freedom of powerlessness.

Doubtful moments gathered, sewn into a fine cloth.

Cloth wrapped around the meaningless distance.

A rainbow view, a bridge between body and void,

Longing, still, always, for both.

These uplands: hard to encompass,

The heart of things. Emptiness sublime.

UPLANDS: wellsprings of the sea

UPLANDS 3.

(Wellsprings of the sea)

It all begins from here.

Next to nothing.

With thoughts unrooted, heady.

Pulled out and upward to limitless blue distances.

It begins moving on the edge of the sedge-grasses;

On the uncertain, treacherous ground;

On the coolness of the wind that carries the spice of death

Deeply within its folds.

It begins on the copper whale-backs of time,

Arcing out of the valley floors,

Carrying scorched stars and the ink of jet certainty

Into the unknown orbit of delivered time.

It begins with a line of trajectory,

An abandoning of nicety,

An allowance of ululating song

And purposeless joy.

It begins with bones, begins with nakedness,

Begins with scattered remnants and piled stones.

It begins with remembering and forgetting,

And a pure tenacity to continue on.

It begins with a circulation of tears,

A saturated weight desiring heft.

Waters moving together, ribbons rippling out of sight.

Peat, brown as beer, iron-rich, blood of earth.

It begins before sound begins,

before the names arrive.

And then the names carry it into our own belonging,

Mapped out and pinned down steady.

Here and here and here,

we dwelt, we smiled, we died.

Always there, hinting blue, lost beyond reach.

Always yearned after, hazily recalled.

Always one step further, one crest away.

Always more real than the real,

Freer than freedom, a weightless soul flight.

There, with the buzzards, with the kites.

There with the patient grumbling stone,

With the stumbling cloud, the hissing mist.

A dream, really, of how it was, of how it will be.

The uplands of heaven, void and singing.

(40)

—

UPLANDS – the rules

UPLANDS (2)

Metres deep, feet, yards even,

Seasons deep, long years,

Scoured, strained, laid down,

A weight of water, a weight of

Tangled sedge-grasses, bones and stone,

Splayed, split on storm skies and roaming mist.

No one lives here long alone.

Bullied and pushed we must lay life on life,

Become entangled, near invisible,

Even to wheeling hawk, even to stoat and marten.

Tangle-rooted, stubborn as a song,

A narrow path wound between dry bluff and impossible wood.

The air here, though, pretends its own freedom.

Not trapped by contour nor disguised

As happy distance.

Pharoah’s prophet on Drigarn Ddu points an accusing finger.

The rules are here, laid out clear on rippled stone.

No wavering, no equivocation, no interpretation.

A bleak love and a hungry wind.

Garn Ddu on fire at sunset, the flashing shout of heather,

Open-mouthed, sinewed dust.

They still shall congregate on the circle of the horizon.

They shall come no nearer but yet beat your heart tender.

The Elders, entranced, caved-up, walled in rubble, unroofed.

Bitter beauty viewed from lascivious valleys: a yearning, there for here,

And here for there.

It is the paradox of the old religion heaped up to the silent sky.

The paradox of breath and flesh.

Leave it be. Become something else.

This impossible gradient burned into the land’s heart.

The desolation that gives us life.

—

UPLANDS : near eternal rules

UPLANDS

1 (Near-eternal rules)

A perfect sky.

My tangled, old hands

forget themselves.

The valley dreams of the uplands and

The uplands dream of heaven,

and sing it so.

Easy it is to breathe its names

In the luscious sap

of hidden streams.

Easy it is to forget, though,

how to remain there,

Discomforted by continents of swelling air,

The sweeping veils of rain,

the unlikelihood of easy paths,

and how the weighted body

Yearns for flight

and how all thoughts always turn back

To the curling, dreaming bracken

and sullen silent stone.

The harsh gods gravitate here,

Born of flesh and born again,

with their horns and thunderheads.

Mud-spattered,

they hew and heft,

carve deeply the near-eternal rules.

Their language, as guttural, as singing,

as the falling crevices’ echo.

As the waters do,

melting away long millennia,

shaping bodies for breath

and for joy.

The deep folds of a planet’s shifting dream

Upon whose hunched shoulders

All the little things thrive.

With Euron and Eurwys

“I was with Euron and Eurwys..”

In the resounding halls, in the forest deep,

By the shattering hearth, bright-eyed, exhilarated

I was with Euron and Eurwys, changing skins, making roads.

Casting seeds, nesting, fruiting,

Gathering blossoms for the feasting.

In the garden dripping with rain,

Cool-browed at the spine-tree,

Watchng stars dance and divide.

In the scented earth, neck deep,

Learning from worms the peaceful transformation.

At the end of the day and at the dawn.

Dumb, speechless as rivers, knowing all things.

At the grinding end of continents,

The whispering whimper of worlds.

At the evocation of gases, at the mudra of fire.

Weaving the plaid the poets know,

The language that ends suffering.

On the mountain top with clouds of mistrust,

With the prisons of the Law.

Moving through the doors of stone,

Frost-cracked, marked with cold tongues.

Moving through the doors of song,

Weightless as whales that dream of deeper things.

Cascading, fountaining in the fort revolving,

Perfectly formed, chased and limned

With ancestral universes.

With the primal poets, the prime progenitors,

Careless and frugal, weighing out worth,

The hierarchies of sound, tricksters of vision.

With the echoing bells, the endless carillons,

With the deep trumpets and the drums of bone.

Slow and pointed the needle words sew,

The rents repaired, the new gods fashioned.

There in the mountain storm, in the torrent,

In the slide of earth and the shattering of walls.

In the dark at midday, in the throne,

On the cross, forgiven and forgiving,

The sword of light in the shining hand.

There with Aristotle and Alexander,

With Ptolemy and Zeus,

Dappled Aphrodite, deadly Diana,

And the bear-wrapped wanderers.

The naked, jet-black girls.

With the figures of light

That flicker behind the veils.

With the dancing dragons,

The drunken souls of dreaming.

With the panoply of meaning.

With the caparisons of delight,

With the mysteries of silence.

Mute before catastrophe,

Gathering souls and names,

Sailing away west into night,

East into dawn birdsong.

The bow of the moon,

Giving us new birth.

—

It’s a while since I posted here – I find the working of this site increasingly tedious and opaque, when it was once so straightforward. That’s progress for you. I will be putting up more of last year’s words to sort of catch up on myself , at least partially. See there is an autocorrect butting in now, great!