The Book Day

Posted on by celfypridd

Three boxes suddenly appeared
on the living room floor
Books cleared from a child’s room
Boxes filled with old friends
Books bought so long ago
So now my writing desk is surrounded
As I renew our acquaintance
Lorca’s Poet in New York.
Cesare Paves’s The Political Prisoner.
Opening the yellow pages
of Among Women Only
I catch the scent of the days
I worked in the steel works
And read it over and over again
on the way home on the train.

Rescuing is a goodness of its own

Posted on by celfypridd

 

The dog had woken and was restless

And you said in the dark it’s an owl

Of course the dog knew differently

And persisted licking the fingers

Of my hand to waken me

Out of that place of deep darkness.

I followed her down over the stairs

And saw the cat play with the bird

And then dart away from the fluttering

In the curtain and the distressed sound

Of a small bird alone and confused

I took it in a quick actioned grasp

And felt its heart beating fast

In the darkness I felt its wings

And stretched each leg to ascertain

That none of those small bones

Were bitten through or broken

Then I let it loose and heard it flutter

And it flew away into the darkness.

Rescuing is a goodness of its own.

 

 

Summer day on the hill

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Summer day on the hill

A short walk out on the hill today

Making my way up the country lane

A mile and a half there and back

The Ash trees are weighed

With bundles of samara

The rowan berries

Filling beginning

To slowly change

To that bright orange

Hawthorns stacked

With umbles of berries

And the beginnings

Of that red blush

That will fill thrushes

During winter days

And oaks show

The small green acorns

That will fill and grow

And squirrels and crows

Will feed on them

When days turn cold

And the old crab trees

On that wet lane corner

crowded with tiny

red tinged apples

An old tree fallen

Lies on its side

With an eye watching.

 

 

RAC

Listening to the soughing wind

Posted on by celfypridd

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Out on the mountain watching the rain move in

From the Severn Channel thinking I was caught

Walking boggy ground on the old Miskin Estate

But I stood still watching as the rain grey shroud

Passing me by covered the dim domed lower hills

I found myself listening out there to the wind blow

Soughing its sighs through the conifer plantation

Blasted and flattened by a New Year gale that felled

The woodlands on the hill tops and frosted high slopes

So that in the morning it looked as if a battle or war

had broken out while we slept off  the New Year party

It was a scene of desolation walking through forests

Like some Paul Nash painting of shattered Ypres trees

Fifteen years later the trees have still not recovered

The walls of the estate built to enclose common land

Have fallen too and are now used in places to make paths

Where the land is wet and poached by cattle hooves

But although these long dry stone walls have tumbled

We have different kinds of walls built to close us in

This relentless psychologised industrial consumerism

That inflicts its message on the first day of a child’s birth

You need, you want and you can’t ever get enough.

 

Poetry

Posted on by celfypridd

 

DSC_7291In the “White Goddess” Robert Graves wrote that  poetry  – “Once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family of living creatures among which he was born….it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in science, philosophy and industry, and brought ruin upon himself and his family.” (From The call of the wild: Paul Kingsnorth The Guardian Essay Saturday 23rd July 2016).

Time takes time

Posted on by celfypridd

 

There is no measure

For the correct time

To heal and recover.

 

So now healing

Is by measure

To heal and recover.

 

There is a quick fix

A couple of weeks

To heal and recover?

 

There is no measure

For the correct time

To heal and recover.

 

The soul ah the soul

The time to heal

The time to recover.

 

We talk of the mind

No talk of the soul

And the time to recover

 

There is no measure

For the correct time

To heal and recover.

 

We talk of the mind

No talk of the spirit

And the time to recover.

 

Wounds not visible

Wounds not measurable

Wounds not vocalised.

 

Wounds.

Time takes time

In its own time.

 

Young

Posted on by celfypridd

Young

 

I’m old

By others standards

Experience

And a life lived

Apparently

 

I dispute my years

I don’t fit the new

My gauge isn’t set the same

How you feel

Is what really matters

 

I see adverts for new

and young poets

I am now silenced

In what I write

Apparently

 

But through my life

I have done great things

Helped heal a child

So many children

Over the years

 

Spoken to the soul

Of another

And another

Urged a smile

And reinstalled hope

In so many

 

 

I have never been silent

I live with my eyes

Wide open

Listening.

 

RAC.