Complete Collection - In Release Order

Just a Month From Midsummer
Lost Causes
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah
The Traveler
Reunion
Camping in Wessex
Imaginative Minds
Solstice
Penderyn's Grave
The Best We Can
And Then Rain
So-and-So
Easter Mysteries
Here and There
Scattered Stones
Eira (Snow)
Scenes from an Old Movie
Portals
Garden Path
The Wanderer
The Shed
I Lawr I Hyn (Down to This)
Crystal Dreams
Becoming
Gate-crasher
Ashen Solace
Night Fright & Ecstatic
Reflection
The Talisman
Allegory
Shrovetide Fair
Sventeen Seasons
Cymylu (Overcast)
Bilge & Beachcomber
Blue Natural
50th Birthday Gift
Lie Lightly
Hard Landing
A Dancer & Oh My Love
Father
Just Motionless and Lost
Dramaless Day
Rhapsodic & Then Rain
The Driver
As if...
Silver Terrace Cemetery
Idris Speaks (video enhanced)
San Anselmo Reprise
Questions in Llareggub
Mawl a Marwnad Afan
Kyle
Similar Weather
Sleep
Timekeeper
The Girls of Summer

Beams of Light

    

Being in the presence of natural beauty has a way of casually opening up our hearts and souls, and of bringing out the philosopher in all of us. In this case a birdsong early one summer morning was the agency.

    

Growing up, as I think of it, is in one respect, a process of putting aside childish things. But try as we might, some things are and should be kept, even if they appear to others as human foibles or childish.

    

Whether you grew up in Wales, Wisconsin or Western Australia in the mid to late sixties, your life would have been changed to a lesser or greater degree by the mop-headed, cheeky lads from Liverpool. My own life, like hundreds of thousand of others, would never be the same. They spoke for us, sang to us and saved us from normality. In response we dressed like them, thought like them and bought their records by the million. If they had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent them.

    

In one sense we're all travelers. The only difference, in the end, being the various mementos we bring home with us.

    

Old traditions often have an almost magical power. After all, there are reasons why they survive for sometimes hundreds of years. A Cymanfa Ganu is a gathering of any number of church choirs and congregations to sing in joint celebration.

    

Wessex is an old name for an area of England that included the south coast. Where magpies are said to steal jewelry. Cormorants hold their wings straight out to dry after diving for fish. Seagulls react to changes in weather. Ospreys sometimes build nests on cliff ledges.

    

A poet once said to me that poetry has only a couple of subjects: love and relations, time passing and creativity. Just a thought.

    

The word solstice (heulsaf) refers to the shortest and longest days of the year respectively, when momentarily the sun appears to stand still.

    

Dic Penderyn (Richard Lewis) was born and was buried in my home parish of Aberafan. He was unjustly hung for his part in the Merthyr Riots of 1831. A not insignificant part of my growing up involved apocryphal stories about this working class hero and martyr.

    

Arizona is not the only place to enjoy summer rain storms, but they are especially welcome in the hot dry desert, and seem almost intimate in the mountains because of the elevation. Anyway, everyone everywhere should pay attention to the often extreme weather pattern swings these days, if only for our grandkids sake.

    

No one can predict the weather any distance ahead these days. Western Europe and my own Wales have broken all records for heat. The Southwest and adopted home Arizona are in a severe and extended drought, and on and on all over the world. Under these circumstances, the great cycles of seasons, whether out of sorts or not, take on vital significance for everyone. The return of measurable summer rains to Arizona this year, at least, has given the distressed land and people a little respite.

    

I think everyone at least occasionally looks back at the good ol' days. It’s just a question of whether those memories make you regretful or grateful. Many, including myself, experience a little of each, with the scale tipped–most days!–towards the sunny side.

    

Easter is, without doubt, mysterious. Not only the resurrection itself but even how the date of this moveable feast is calculated: the Sunday following the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. And indeed, Spring is visible proof of the perennial return of light and life after cold, dark, winter days. Life, death, the full moon and eternity, all of these things, contribute to the mystery of the time, and the need to ask questions to try to make sense out of it all.

    

Maybe it’s my age or the age we all live in, but It’s not easy to look to the future without at times finding myself in a negative mood and, the self-fulfilling prophesy that it is, to never be surprised by disappointment. But when able to look forward with an open mind, disappointments are rarer and I’m more often pleasantly surprised.

    

Memories have a life of their own. They come and go according to no known rules, but can be strengthened by storytelling. They can be passed on in the same way as family heirlooms, which in fact they are. Whether you strongly believe in an afterlife or not, recollections, in one sense at least, keep our ancestors if not alive, then relevant, even vibrant.

    

This is two poems written in Welsh then translated into English later. The Welsh originals are in Englyn form; a development of ancient bardic practice. They were written in different places and  times; the first, Eira (Snow), in Hope, Idaho, the second (untitled) in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. The person in the snow is dreaming of a place in the sun. The musical arrangement uses traditional techniques of setting such poetry to music, known as Cerdd Dant.

    

Growing up, all the kids in our street in South Wales wanted to be cowboys. We’d all talk like gunslingers and get hats, belts and toy six shooters for birthdays and Christmas. Fully grown, I wonder if sometimes those same  kids feel as I do, looking at the sometimes numbing state of the world today and, with no alternative release of anxiety, wish we were kids again, taking leading roles in scenes from an old movie.

    

Why can a photograph or painting of something as ordinary as a bowl of fruit amaze the onlooker? Why can a series of musical notes played on a violin bring tears to your eyes? Why can otherwise ordinary words, arranged in a particular order in a poem, seem to open wide the doors of perception?  This mystery has preoccupied creative people since Old King Cole was in kindergarten. It has even spawned one or two imaginative works itself.

    

Email messages are often cryptic, at least one I received recently was. Unlike face to face conversations, phone calls or even old fashioned letters, emails often seem lacking in subtle colorings of meaning and/or feeling. The email that inspired the poem that follows, came from an old friend who lives on a different continent and, like myself, is in his early 70s. He wrote that one summer evening he was enjoying a walk in his garden. At one point in his narrative, a suggestion of melancholy enigmatically and perhaps intentionally crept into his writing.

    

My grandmother Cressandra was clairvoyant, and would occasionally make predictions that turned out to be true. Seeing her teenage grandson admire himself in the mirror on one occasion she said, "One day you may see something in that mirror you don’t want to see." 60 years later, I know what she meant.

    

We in the Western World, and I’m sure in many other wealthy places, have too much stuff. Just about everyone I know has an attic, basement, garage, storage unit or shed. These often are places to throw and forget things no longer being regularly used but thought to be of some worth, if only sentimental. Whether because of changes of life, location or just a need to tidy things up, there comes a time to go through the shed. Every time this happens, there will be revelations.

    

No matter how expected, when grief rears its ugly head, the unawareness of the majority of people to your raging sadness, as they go about their everyday lives, seems almost callous. It can almost make you want to shout out, "Don’t you know what’s happened?" But of course, to come to grips with that grief will eventually mean rejoining that everyday majority, although as a permanently changed person.

    

I think most would agree we live in turbulent times. Then again every generation has surely experienced stormy if not tempestuous spells. What’s more important is how we cope with that heavy weather. Do we grit our teeth, struggle to our feet, leaning into the gale? Do we confidently let the rising water wash over us, in the knowledge that the flood will recede? I think the answer will be different for everyone, but perhaps predictable from how we’ve dealt with rough patches in the past, and what we’ve gleaned from those sometimes tumultuous experiences.

    

After many years of searching for some kind of permanence in life, I eventually found it in the realization that change is certain to come. As they say, you can take it to the bank. Nothing, even if it takes a thousand years, remains unchanged. Perhaps not so strangely for an incurable optimist, I take solace in this. I was greatly helped in my revelation by the I Ching, aka The Book of Changes!

    

Maybe I’m naive, but I sometimes feel that relatives and friends who are no longer with us are, on some special occasions, still part of the gathering. You might say that at 71 I’m senile, and that maybe true, but even as a child I thought this. In fact I find it’s a reassuring thought in this age of enforced isolation and rampant alienation that we have loving companions who are never far away.

    

There’s a fine line between accepting the inevitable and taking a stand against the often negative, yet impersonal forces in life that seek to take us down. This seems particularly relevant at the moment, with the pandemic raging around our once perhaps complacent, everyday activities. Reality can’t be avoided, but surrender is not an option.

    

These are two nighttime poems written at quite different times but strongly connected. One being saved from a nightmare by a night bird, the other a waking wonderment at one of the most enchanting singers I have ever heard… human or not!

    

The most mysterious aspect of existence is consciousness. What is it that makes us aware of being alive, of being loving, breathing, sentient creatures? This question—or one similar—has preoccupied philosophers, priests and poets since King Solomon was a boy. These verses are my attempt, if not to find an answer, then to phrase the question in a better way for myself and possibly others.

    

It would seem strange to find reassuring permanence in the desert of the Southwest, in an environment that can be brutal and unforgiving. Just stand out in the noonday sun in June for 10 minutes and watch the buzzards circle, or listen to the rushing wave of a flash flood carrying trees, boulders and once rugged vehicles along a recently dry wash. Or imagine the hunger in the eyes of the coyote, owl, mountain lion or rattle snake as they set out under a crescent moon to hunt and survive. But strangely enough, there is a permanence of sorts in this harsh cycle of life, death and rebirth. It just takes a little while to show itself.

    

    

I wrote this poem in the late 1990s. Even though poets tend to look back to imaginary golden days, they sometimes accidentally anticipate the future. Well, to tell the truth, the ancient bards of Wales were part wordsmith, part sear; they were expected to foresee whatever was to come, whether it was victory or defeat. In this case, with the present pandemic, I hate being clairvoyant.

The Shrovetide Fair occurred right before Lent, when everyone atoned for their sins.

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

    

There’s a long-held Welsh folk tradition that pigs can see the wind. People can only see its effect, but as a metaphor for the human condition, it is clearly visible.

    

It’s proverbial that that those born, bred and still living in their immediate environments often have forgotten the exceptionality of their surroundings. Frequently, famous, even world famous, landmarks and places of beauty or mystery have been absorbed into the everyday. The traveler, expatriate and passerby often have the advantage of fresh eyes and curiosity, to take what for many has become ordinary and rediscover a world of wonders!

    

They were looking for gold, at first throwing away silver-bearing rocks, when someone realized the folly, and the Comstock Lode was discovered in Virginia City, Nevada. It was the richest silver discovery in history, attracting miners and camp followers from all over the world, including people from Wales and even Mark Twain. The city's cemetery readily attests to an extraordinary diversity of dreamers. Ironically, some of the old mines actually extended under the resting place of many of these miners. This irony inspired the following poem.

    

    

    

    

Two expatriates, at one time living near each other in Southern England, then Northern California, meet from time to time to recollect, make music, look forward, exchange dreams, bandage old and new wounds, and seamlessly resume a friendship spanning over 40 years. There are always major changes, but, at heart, the important things remain unchanged. William Blake understood this.

The musical accompaniment was composed/improvised and recorded in the same room in San Anselmo California, in which the poem was written, over a period (on and off) of many years.

     talking to Dylan Thomas...

...at the Boathouse     

Kelly and John the Boathouse, some time ago...  

     love and loss of childhood...

the River Afan by David Good     

     getting over a loss...

...creativity heals     

     international spring...

     a midsummer night's dream...

     regulating the clock...

"I think it's a first installment of a 20 year scrapbook of song, verse, instrumental, with story and legend to be added in future linked episodes ...sort of an alphabet 'cawl' with musical croutons. The theme is a loose narrative, created by longtime traveling, learning, laughing, forgetting, regretting and loving..."

And I will build bridges, night and day,
Lay strong beams of light.
And I will read from the book of dreams,
Walk Wisdom's well traveled causeway.

Just motionless and lost
late wayward children
shaken in faith yet faithfully
following obscured footprints our
discovering fathers had sometime left on
vanishing sands of tidal lives

Now and then
once and ever
great and small

All!

Microscopic stones in the Universal Shoe

[ Ancient to Modern* ]

Star-castled above engines of siege,
Spindrifting silver threads of time,
Arianrhod--ironing--watches "Wheel of Fortune".

Flicking ash from cigarettes,
Wondering:  "Should I stop or spin?"

[ Charade - A Parlour Game ]

The glitter ball revolves
littering round faces
with spiral galaxies.
Slow slow quick quick slow
dance sounds inform...
shuffle feet around
sand-sequined floors.
(Rhythmic inebriates
back-beat high
blind to expectation
unaware of time.)

Suddenly the music
unexpectedly stops.
Dumbfounded!
can't find a chair.

Light, late night rains hold
saddened, Southern warmth,
Trickle-fingering, trigger past-tense.
I, indyingly search, find shelter
from the Westerly dawning storm.

And I will build bridges, night and day,
Lay strong beams of light.
And I will read from the book of dreams,
Walk Wisdom's well traveled causeway.