Nature

All About Angels

 

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All About Angels

Angels: many people believe in them, some people don’t. ‘What are they really like?’ you ask. Well, the ones I have seen, and they are the only ones I can talk about, are nothing like the angels we see in old church paintings.

 Angels visit me regularly. They speak to me through the mouths of innocent birds and beasts and I listen to them carefully, for they are the messengers of Gaia, the earth goddess. If we do not listen to the earth goddess, if we don’t pay attention to her words, the earth and the people who live on it will be in serious trouble, sooner or later.

 So, go out into the garden and the woods. Walk softly. Stand beneath autumn trees. Watch for footprints in the winter snow. Above all, watch out for the living creatures with which we share our world. Listen to them when they speak to you. Pay attention to their words. Do not ignore them, and remember St. Francis of Assisi who called them his brothers and sisters, for that’s exactly what they are. They are our extended family and as we treat them, so will we ourselves be treated when Gaia, the earth goddess, calls us home.

Pensive Angel

 “A penny for your thoughts!”

 The pansies turned their heads,
gazing at her with great disdain.

 They are the lowest of the low,
yet grow again, each year,
from their own scattered seed,
like weeds.

 Their faces are beautiful,
bursting suddenly from winter’s
white dream.

 They create pastel thoughts and fill
the flowerbeds with secret dreams
that they alone can see.

All About Angels, my next book of poetry,  will soon be available on Amazon and Kindle.

Wild Bird

 

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Wild Bird

 A wild bird has built
her nest in my heart.

Her blood-beat
flutters new rhythms.

Birdsong streams
sunlight in my pulse.

Afloat I knew the sea-
surge lift and pull.

Now hot blood rises
with the sun and sets
with this glorious fall
from heaven to earth:

sweet helter-skelter
glide of current and cloud.

Hair is to head
as feather is to nest.

The egg of my skull
shows hairline cracks:

tiny beaks pecking
fine-tuned sparks of song.

Late Summer Angel

 

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Late Summer Angel

“It’s good to stop, while mowing,
and to rescue that one red leaf,
and that one yellow leaf,
and that other leaf
the sun has spotted,
like an old man’s hand.

And it’s good to stay
bent over for a while,
to rest and to gaze
at the October fungi,
mushrooms and toadstools,
thrusting from the earth:
puff balls, dust balls,
little brown umbrellas.

 And it’s good to see
where the moles
have dug new houses.”

 “Better yet,”
says the autumn angel,
“is to stand beneath
the trees, drinking up
the sunlight.

Raise your hand and see
your skin fragmented
into a coat of many colors.”

 Sunshine through
a stained glass window.

 Light rains
droplets down
through speckled leaves.

Note: Late Summer Angel is from All About Angels, the poetry collection that I am currently revising for re-publication. It will be available online at Amazon and Kindle in time for Christmas, 2016.

 

 

October Angel

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October Angel

birds peck their way
through egg shell skies
in search of summer

 ice pellets strike dead foliage

the October Angel
hangs suet from the rowan

a finger of wind
stirs stubborn leaves
whirling them round and round
in a carousel of color

she gathers her evening gown
and walks among ruined flowers

a snapdragon opens
the frosted forge of its mouth
and sprinkles the sky
with ice-hard shards of fire

Note: October Angel is from All About Angels, the poetry collection that I am currently revising for re-publication.

Fall

 

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Fall

Just one leaf dropping from the tree
and the fall a call of nature and no freak
chance of fate. What throw of the dice
eliminates Lady Luck? None at all,
or so the poet says, lying there, indisposed,
his ribs cracked hard against the wooden
boards of the porch and his right foot
caught in such a way that the hip slips
slightly from its socket and try as he may
he cannot stand but lies there in the chill
evening wind, a lone leaf, getting on in age,
plucked from his tree and cast to the ground.

Golden Angels

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Golden Angels
(from All About Angels)

They stand beneath guardian trees
their saffron garments glossed with gold.

Hands cupped, bodies bent,
they softly swell as they dip
beneath the rain.

They speak to me:
wild prophets from an ancestral book
that I believed in when I was a child,
but no longer understand.

I try to read the aroma of their lips,
their slow, small growth of gesture.

Their wings are traps
tripping my tongue
preventing me from flight.

In Absentia 1

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In absentia

Prelude

1

 The Beaver Pond

Tomorrow, early, my love, you’ll fly away.
Today, you’ll walk round the Beaver Pond
where red and yellow leaves abound. A thin grey

webbing garlands one dead tree. I’m not too fond
of tent worms. I hate them when they swing
from low branches. Give me a fresh green frond

caught by the morning sun in early spring
or else bright autumn leaves so soon to fall.
I love American Goldfinches when they sing

that last departing song. I love most of all
those occasional visitors: do you recall that bright
blue Indigo Bunting with his “I’m-a-lost-bird call?”

The hunting hawks give everyone a fright.
They perch on top of a garden tree
then step off into space to claw-first alight

on some poor songbird trilling away, quite free
from fear, his unfinished symphony of song.
It’s getting late, my love. You walk towards me
out of the woods. I’ll end this poem with a plea:
don’t forget me … and don’t stay away too long.

Gower

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To Be Welsh in Gower

To be Welsh in Gower is to spell it funny
and pronounce it worse: Gŵyr.

It’s to know how to say Pwll Ddu.

It’s meeting the cows in the lane to Brandy Cove
and knowing them all by name and reputation,
which one kicks, which one gores,
when to walk in the middle of the lane,
and when to jump for the safety of the hedge.

It’s to know the difference between the twin farmers
Upper Jones and Lower Jones.

It’s to recognize their sheepdogs, Floss and Jess,
and to call them with their different whistles.

It’s knowing the time of day by sun and shadow.

It’s knowing the tide is in or out
by the salt smell in the air
without ever needing to see the sea;

and now, in this far off land,
it’s hearing your stomach growl
for caws wedi pobi, crempog or teisen lap
whilst memory’s fish-hook tugs at your heart

like your father tugged at salmon bass,
fishing from the sand-pebbled beach
at Rhossili, Pennard, or Three Cliffs.

Wales

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Wales

Wales is whales to my daughter
who has only been there once on holiday,
very young, to see her grandparents,
a grim old man and a wrinkled woman.

They wrapped her in a shawl and hugged her
till she cried herself to sleep
suffocating in a straitjacket of warm Welsh wool.

So how do I explain the sheep?

They are everywhere, I say, on lawns, in gardens.

I once knew a man
whose every prize tulip was devoured by a sheep,
a single sheep who sneaked into the garden
the day he left the gate ajar.

They get everywhere, I say, everywhere.

Why, I remember five sheep
riding in a coal truck leering like tourists
travelling God knows where
bleating fiercely as they went by.

In Wales, I say, sheep are magic.

When you travel to London on the train,
just before you leave Wales
at Severn Tunnel Junction,
you must lean out the window and say
“Good morning, Mister Sheep!”

And if he looks up,
your every wish will be granted.

And look at that poster on the wall:
a hillside of white on green,
and every sheep as still as a stone,
and each white stone a roche moutonnée.

On Being Welsh

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On Being Welsh

I am the all-seeing eyes at the tip of Worm’s Head;
I am the teeth of the rocks at Rhossili;
I am the blackness in Pwll Ddu pool
when the sea-swells suck the stranger
in and out, sanding his bones.

Song pulled taut from a dark Welsh lung,
I am the memories of Silure and beast
mingled in a Gower Cave;
tamer of aurox,
hunter of deer,
caretaker of coracle
fisher of salmon on the Abertawe tide,
I am the weaver of rhinoceros wool.

I am the minority,
persecuted for my faith,
for my language, for my sex,
for the coal-dark of my thoughts;

I am the bard whose harp,
strung like a bow,
will sing your death
with music of arrows
from the wet Welsh woods;

I am the barb that sticks in your throat
from the dark worded ambush of my song.