Tag: Mourning

You are Gone

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A mourning song for Gwyn

Dawn arrives yet You are gone. 
The birds are singing yet You are gone.
The flowers are turning their petalled heads
towards the sun yet You are gone.

Your absence is like the spinning of the Void. 

You are gone to its bottommost depths
with Your castle of cold stone.

You are gone but Your haunting
is everywhere with Your promise of return.

You died but You are not dead but only sleeping.

We share a heartbeat and a breath and every one 
brings us a little closer together.
I remember this when 
You are gone.

This is a gifted song that I have been singing for Gwyn at His altar in my morning and evening devotions since His death in His seasonal battle against Gwythyr on Calan Mai after which He sleeps over the summer months in His castle of cold stone. (At night I replace ‘dawn’ with ‘dusk’ and ‘towards’ with ‘from’).

This is the first time I have sung on video and I’ve only sung in public once before in a performance group. I was put off when a friend jestingly told me I ‘sing like a nun’ in the sense I am not rock ‘n’ roll enough. Well I am a nun now so I can sing like a nun!

The image on my altar is a visionary painting by Meg Falconer of Caer Ochren ‘the cold castle under the stone’ from King Arthur’s Raid on the Underworld.

Forest

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Faery Lane, May 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I.

A forest
holds a very small possibility
in the sigla of trees
and in a ruddock’s song.

Raindrops lace the ivy,
in a cinema of shade
fairytales catch hands
with desperate grace.

II.

For in my nightmare
the leaning yew fell down.
The door to Annwn closed,
although the wolves still howl.

The people were dead,
the gods were gone
and the ghosts no longer mourned
their shadowed passing.

III.

Yet the forest
kept alive the possibility
of hope emerging
from its bowers

like a white stag bounding
from Annwn’s mounds
with red-eared hounds
and antlered huntsmen.

IV.

Now we read
the sigla from the trees
and listen out
for a ruddock’s song.

In the cinema of ivy
our myths still dance
a forest of possibility
in a raindrop’s glance.

Faery Lane, May 2013