Dunes...

And then the sand flowed like the tide

Shifting the land at the wave edge of the sea

A vast striated plane of drifting whirling grains:

Aged dunes lost to the wail will of the wind.

As we walked close by the sea suck and ripple

The bound beach rose and swallowed our grounded feet

We seemed to be free floating sand cloud high

In the sandsmoke drifts rushing to their...

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Were you not my watch tower, erect above the chalky cliff

Stone guardian against all, high over the rough tides of my youth?

Was yours not the bastion, planted secure on the high turf:

Whose high walls embraced us and protected?

But that was then, now I am the ascended man -

Now I do not see your turrets from my farther shore

Black waves broke on your defences, your mortar crumbl...

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Those huge white flakes of fish

And the mashed potato dish

Have stayed in my memory

For sixty years

I remember the potato, creamy soft

Had a seasoned, peppery waft

And the choice of sauces:

Egg or parsley

It must have been a whole side of cod

I remember my grandfather like a god

Slowly stood to serve the fish

Separating the flakes

The etched glass...

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improved version!

I read a poem

                about a dresser

                and all the memories it held.

I remembered

                one thing

                in a sideboard.

I remembered

                a long cone shape

                wrapped in cord

                containing something

                hard and dark brown, that smelled.

I never knew

...

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When they grow up they dress in a new life:

a family of new suits and shirts to wear.

And the ties are new too.

He strides out on his new catwalk

proudly wearing his new self,

blind to the day the cloth may unravel

or fade or lose its style.

What will clothe him then?

I shall not grace his shoulders again:

I am the coat he has outworn

in my pockets are his memories

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Too much was lost in silence

too long the time that winds

between our words of love and passion

with communion only in our minds

Too much assumed in union

of our two souls' mute desires

but I did not see her inmost needs

or hear how quietly pain suspires

I should have peeped inside

while she nightly dreamed in peace

to glimpse her mind's apparel

as it dan...

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The empty stems of the fennel

Under umbrella heads of raindrops

Are perches for the waiting birds

The grey green sage leaves

Glow crystal white in the frost

Moss grows where the branch

Leaves the trunk of the bonsai

Its ruddy leaves falling

Amongst the yellowing leaves

A single crimson rose bud perishes

Yellow leaves have fallen from the dogwood

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In the long small hours of dark                 Through the later time of darkness

I pause and gaze out at the stars              As we lay entwined beneath the moon

Somehow the frosted ground                    The nightly scene now sacred

Sharpens the air and the starlight             Welcomes the soft moonglow

Which lights my very soul:                        Entering both...

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Am I to speak for your past?

                May I?

                Should I intrude?

For I am the spectre of your years: I was there beside you

In your cot and at your play

Now

I am all that is left

                I am the breath of your childhood

                I am the oxygen of your life

                There is no limit to my presence in your life

             ...

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Where sea and sky meet

                a green flash from the set sun

Lighting distant shores

In Spring my compass

                navigated the world round

Now Autumn tides ebb

In the Winter storms

                my old life invades the new

Waves crash past the strand

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They come together

                in this place outside

yet at the centre of our world.

We have asked of them

                our destiny

Have demanded nothing of them

                except our future.

Who are these gods in whom we place our trust?

Who are these gods that we have selected?

                These are the senate that we once elected:

The senators that ...

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To discern

                our place

To commune

To see

                beyond our close shadow of death

To focus

                my poet mind

I need direction

                a qibla

Or some beads to tell

                to take refuge from my life:

A candle flame

Only the candle

Flame

Flickering.

A journey into quietude

                begins

Int...

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As we pass through this Autumn realm,

See the valley bound wraiths of mist

Withdrawing like a tide from the willow

Islands of the marshland

With their starkly black boughed trees

Damply dripping with the mist's remains,

Chill air swirls in the rising breeze, and

Black starlings line the wires beyond a barn

But the red kite in his higher flight

Is lost to sight

       ...

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Alf Smith was his name, though, we should remember him

As more than the labourer on a small Welsh farm

Who milked the cows and tended every farmer whim;

Twice daily fitting clusters onto teats and pouring milk to churns,

Taken for collection to stand beside the lane between the ferns.

Twice daily, too, he cleaned the shed with hose and broom

And waited to hear what chores would f...

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What words have passed

What said

What read

What meaning cast?

What recall flows

What thought

What tort

What grievance shows?

What edge is crossed

What line

What sign

What friendship lost?

What nightmare grown

What meme

What seam

What darkness sown?

What text is read

What hyped

What typed

What despair fed?

What lov...

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What is that glint

                as the sod breaks and crumbles:

a sparkling hint

                of discovery

                as I dig the dusty summer soil?

This old garden has gained lost treasures

                of man, woman and child for centuries -

                What lies uncovered?

Teased from the clod

                I find a tiny glass heart and this ...

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And then, suddenly, it was calm - the morning wind which threw

rain hard against the window panes and sent beech leaves rushing

across the grass to pile gold-brown against all that the borders grew,

all slowly dulling their greens to wet, muted browns, brushing

the soil as their leaves curl and droop - vibrant Spring-strength gone,

fading sadly.

                         The wind ...

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MAN:          In so short a time

I saw a future

Flow

Created

From the formless waters

Born

From the darkness

The way begins

All words are water

Flowing

GAIA:             From my innermost being

       I gave abundance!

My words flow from the mountain top

My words give succour to the land

My words are the waters of the sea

PRIEST:          The ...

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From the mountain

I pour forth

I give you my waters

                to drink

                and the many words

                                of my waters

                                to hear.

My waters have seen

the gathering

on the hill

above the lake

My waters have heard

the prayers

on the grass bank

My waters have known

the worship

in t...

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Though they are mine

I have no wisdom

Though they know me

They are deaf

                In their mind

I am a man apart

I am all that is left

I am the helix of their birth and death and being

                Knowing one, I know all

I am a voice

I seek nothing I seek peace

I hear all and I reflect

I see words and I grieve

I sense pain and I weep

I feel ...

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words

            no man should know

            or say

words

            no child should hear:

            parent, pray

            to be spared.

as he sat with his sons at home

and struggled to find

words:

he knew

            she will never return to us

he knew

            she is too ill

In a time when she was strong

for them

as her body weake...

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i

Innocent

     he met a force

Untried

            it held him

... and wonder drained the world of substance

            re-arranged the pages of his book to give more radiant a reading.

The light of new possibilities

pressed down on time.

The girl sang to him "You can hear the boats go by". He

l...

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Much more than half my life ago

Some chance led us to this place;

Now, my heart is caught and held

By the peace of its earth and space.

Some while past, when first she left me

I could not make my soul adjust

But cached it safe within the plot

Beside her memory and her mortal dust.

And as the family aged and spread

My lonely tenancy grew content

Past spectres...

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And then

            at my source

I was lost to your ocean.

Flowing... your endless bounty stole my direction

            your depths embraced

            your corals welcomed my load

I drowned in your currents.

My hands caressed

your waves

My body plumbed

your deepest sounds

Your pools

received

Your tides were constant

            I sw...

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Restless: my body is your ocean; my limbs the currents of the sea

You float on my waves - sink only a little

I hold your sacred vessel safe - we become one:

A perfect balance of forces

Your body runs its course through my being

I feel you cleave my waves

I know you as we sink

Black waters closing

And I know you as we rise

I hold you to float above the tide as we burst th...

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Ah! I loved you!

Lost to your soul,

            I bared my heart

Within your mind

            I held my heart...

            as if all hearts sang with mine

                        as if all lips knew

I felt your blood pulse

            and heat my soul

            as your hair scourged my body

                        (Ah! I loved your hair!)

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I find that I must live in a world

Where, between that desperate dusk and a new dawn,

And between many a dawn and its dusk,

The only reality lies in love.

To be in love in that first dawn

And in the dusk, was to feel the sun

Warm our very passion every minute of every hour,

Reality lay only in the other.

And beyond that dreadful dusk, nothing

but dawns and dusk and ...

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Time stretched as she faded;

Lengthened, folded in on time

Extended, never ended.

Eternity must have seemed

An earthly hell

Peopled intermittently by friends:

A nightmare dream of pain and daemons

What superhuman will

Kept her through those summer months

What need, desire or wish

Held death's sad end at bay?

In the end, fading faded

Light left, sy...

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You see

            a land wraithed in smoke and the stink of death

You feel

            man's determination dulled by desperation and

            the hollow, guilty hope that the creeping fate might end

            at a neighbour's door.

You cannot farm in the present

At least not in Wales.

The hills were silent memorials to herds brought low,

Uncropped: a tragedy of gr...

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First, the over-quiet room where we sat together

Waiting, quiet as all the others – waiting

Until she left me for the first time…

Then I was called

As he spoke the shock hit, solid as a punch;

Left me breathless, faint, unmanned;

So obviously lost that chair and water came

And briefly the patient was I – not her.

Then my mind began to grasp the truth it had shunne...

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The shock was solid as a punch

That left me breathless, faint, unmanned;

So obviously lost that chair and water came

And it was I – so very briefly – nursed

Until my mind began to grasp the truth it had shunned.

How could I not have guessed or known

The woe, the pain, the destruction?

After all these many years, my failure to feel –

My hiding from the very possibility ...

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I find that I must live in a world

Where, between that desperate dusk and a new dawn,

And between many a dawn and its dusk,

The only reality lies in love.

To be in love in that first dawn

And in the dusk, was to feel the sun

Warm our very passion every minute of every hour,

Reality lay only in the other.

And beyond that dreadful dusk, nothing

but dawns and dusk and ...

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The sound of one hand clapping

Who said that?

But I know what it means, now:

It is the lost beat of one heart loving

Not waving but drowning

I know that one:

Both origin and relevance now:

It is no pleasure, but one soul's need

No man is an island, entire of itself

Sung, used, re-used

The obvious is no less poignant

Now that I've found and lost my land

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We came upon

A mystic way leading nowhere but the hills.

Floored in leaves, tree roofed, bank-bound

Untrodden but by wanderers for centuries past.

What lay beyond, worthy of such industry?

Perhaps a long forgotten hearth tenured by shepherd or crone.

Or did this tended track pass on to a hilltop way:

Miles now lost to grass and sheep,

A one-time druidic path to some time-er...

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                                    After Ezra Pound and Giacomo Leopardi

And so you were

everything to me, that is now less than dust –

                        lost, captive of the soil

That surrounds and nourishes my soul.

And so now I –

still stranded, umbral shade of past desire – 

                        left, am guardian of sad recall

watching branch and blo...

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Cariad

A word of the heart

Born deep in the being,

            resonant with the land's love  

Cariad

A word for the soul

Harmonic with soft timbre,

            warmed on heart's ember

Cariad

A word from the deep

Breathed only in love -

            impossible to deny

Cariad

A word never of the brain

Soft spoke; heart's heat

            ea...

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In those darkest, darkling months

when both belief and hope were lost

when love was stretched taught beyond endurance

when pain and understanding spiralled

Still

There was some doubt of destiny:

could love be snatched away;

and child a mother lose?

A new reality to supplant all we knew

                                                                        and dreamt.

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Yesterday, the sun shone black upon my soul

Depth's depth deep beneath my heart.

Lumined ne'er by hope

Thoughts sank weighted low

Today, dawn'd, in heaven's mantle rais'd,

Glims golden future in my mind.

Light lightened all by future faith

Heart, mind and soul exalting up

Her voice love levered up, returned it from the depths

Dark voids where happiness was stra...

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Walking, I discover

Hills I never knew in thirty years of passing;

Valleys, deserted, hidden in folds and time:

Mair says once there was a community here

Self contained, sufficient unto itself

Walking, I find

Landscapes we could have seen before, perhaps shared

Their riches, dreamed their past, known their present:

I'm told these Druid hills sing history itself

Sing...

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                                    To a friend

There is a small and unremarkable bridge I often cross

That now stands guardian to the memory of a friend.

When your burden became too much, it held you in its thrall

And gave passage across your own imagin’d Styx.

And on that very day and hour your demon choice was made

What base chance made me bypass the bridge, and you?

This i...

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There is no meaning

            and no sense,

            only clarity

I loved you and my heart began -

            past years unknown

            past pulse forgot

            Love created  

            our heart defined

            our lips sang

            our hands mapped

                        love

I loved you with my eyes          ...

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The sky in front of me is pink, as I drive home‚

there will be a frost tonight.

Beneath it the brackened hills lie pinkly rust

And trees stand starkly laced in contrast

I see every distant twig defined, sharp against the pearlescent sky.

Not much later, I sit over tea and look west

to where the sky is left creamily gold.

Above, the darkling blue is split by a fading pink ...

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