Frosty Yule

Underfoot the path is icy

Still slick with the morning frost

I can feel my feet slip

Just enough to make me falter

Uncertain, I look around

For safer ground

To find the grass is singing

Ablaze with early silver sunshine

Festooned with ice crystals

All shining brightly in the light

And overhead in a blue sky

Choirs of cloud angels fly

Soon the year turns

A slow alchemy

Changing

Like the frost to mist

In the sunlight

Now

I have paused long enough

For the cold air to bite through my coat

Trees drip with melt water

But the Yule light has filled my heart

And the ice is vapour in the air
The path ahead is there


Adding a couple more bits and pieces here which were part of 'Windchimes' last year but somehow never posted.  (14/04/18)

The Thorn on the Hill

Silver running

And cobalt blue

St Catherine

St Julian

And St Joan

All the thrones

Turning the sky

My thirsty soul

Turns to the view

And drinks deep

Rinsed in light

Silver running

And cobalt blue

This rock

This throne

This sky

This stone

St Catherine

St Julian

And St Joan

This land

Bathed in light
Love calls home

Angel

Fall into my arms and sing

Voice as soft as angels wings

We will find a way to bring

Love into the world

Dark Energy

I imagine inside the black hole

Where I have been condensed to

A point of non-existence

An image erased to nothing but faint reminders

An echo frozen

And from this point

I see the whole universe is now

Travelling in two directions

Expanding and contracting

Ever faster

Ever slower

Quantum bellows exhorting

This puffer fish engine into shape

I see everything

While I am nothing

My very substance transformed from solid

To a strange phantasm

Pouring back into the universe

All trace of me gone

And yet reborn

Beyond the quantum sum

I am released from gravity's grip

An incoherent chaos

Of nothing

Returned

Freedom

Walking a lane, drowsy September waking

In the wet nettles and overhanging branch drips

With the shifting chatter of sparrows and finch

A blue sky opens up to billowing fields

And, above the hedge, long past the log piles

I glimpse a tower burnished brightly by an early sun

I am free to walk here, head unbowed

Free of the tirade of modern disappointment

So eagerly sucked into our subconscious

From the endless opinionated social dysfunction

Ready at our fingertips to download more

Here, now, I am not a consumer of contention

Not subject to a hundred ways to be more or less
(And none of it for free), postage and packing paid

For someone else's misconception of perfection

Instead, I am reflected as I am in the silver puddles

Imperfectly reduced to wiggly lines and shifting shapes

Drenched full of light and singing with wild birdsong

Poetry Day 2017

Blue Hill Town

Above the blue hill town

Swifts weave a May Queen's crown

Around the old tower

Dancing in the wide sky

They turn and quarter, flying high

With ribbons of summer

And on the moor below

A golden cloak of buttercups glow

Around the blue hill town

The air is full of summer's heat

And the river still spring water sweet

Maybe our pilgrim paths will meet

(And we will dance like kings and queens)

Like ribbons of summer

Woven through

The blue hill town

[notes: -bury, suffix ~ from old english 'burh' (a fortified place), ton (Dun hillfort) ~ old english enclosure, manor , glas ~ Cornish for blue , Glastonbury Tor is composed of blue lias stone and clays]

Windchimes

I have packed away the wind chimes now

One last song as I walk to the shed

Of old bells and hollow echoes

As long as the winter shadows

Chasing me

Summer is a drift of sepia tinted memories

Caught in the gutters and under pots

As I sweep up those days

A calendar of leaves

Remembering

Now the snow muffles all sound

As it waits out the winter with an icy siege

Slowly numbing the senses

Weighing me down

Into silence

But in my mind a song plays

A breeze of notes in the wind

Warm as a song thrush

In spring sunshine

Wind chimes sing

Wind Chimes ~ 2017

2017 and time to start a new set of poems/songs/words.

The photo, of a cornfield in Norfolk last year, was taken on a walk while the wind played invisible tunes across it, a giant, natural keyboard.

And it reminded me of this, from ten years ago, a poem for a keyboard...

Wind Chimes (and doorbell)

ACF, BDG, CEG, ADA,
ACF, BDG, FAC, EGD,
DFA, FAC, GDG, ADA,
FAC, GBD, ACF, BDG,
FAC, GBG, ACF, BDG,
EC

October Festivals

Diwali

In your heart

Safe from harm

The light of hope

Shines like a charm

Keep hold of hope

To light the way

And chase doubt

Far away

Samhain

The year draws in

All harvests done

Now count the days

Till Spring is come

In the runes

A fortune fold

And in a song

Tall tales are told

Light the bonfire

For more light

We'll celebrate
Samhain tonight

All Hallows Eve, All Souls & Saints and the Day of the Dead

In the candlelight's translucent air

Full of the angels incense and prayer

Dusk and dawn rub thin

To where, beyond death's veil

All sorrows cease

And love prevails

For one night we'll walk

Footsteps across the floor

A shiver in a silver flame

Echoes of the nevermore

In the moonlight's soft embrace

All phantom spirits, ghouls and wraiths

Dance to their ceaseless song

As lanterns call the enchanted throng

By morning light sharp contrast throws

The passing night into fleeting shadows

All Hallows Eve

All Souls, All Saints

And all the Dead

Are passing now into the night

As we walk in the new daylight

All Hallows Eve

All Souls, All Saints

And all the Dead

Across Lethe sail

All sorrows cease

And love prevails