CURLEW

A song alive in memory, though long unheard

Ripples across the years to present the past:

The moorland landscape of Mynydd Bach,

Llyn Eiddwen with water lobelia growing

Through the shallows of the lake and the song

Of the curlew bubbling up to crescendo

Over the cotton grass on the bog on the far side

Where a ruined tower, a folly, sinks into the mire.

All this brought back in vivid re-call

But not so clear as the haunting call

Which would wake the dead and lull the living to sleep

As a woven strand in the song of Rhiannon’s Birds.

So past, present and future meet

In a song that is never forgotten, always heard.

~*~

“I want the Birds of Rhiannon, they that wake the dead and lull the living to sleep, to entertain me that night.”

Ysbaddaden Pencawr from Culhwch and Olwen

More about Llyn Eiddwen HERE

Sanderlings

Sanderlings on Borth Beach. Photo: Lyndon Lomax

On this stony beach with its undertow of sand
the outcrops of peat are trees from another time
that the retreating sea reveals. At the tideline
they flock, lined up for a while along the edge
bobbing into and over the breaking waves
then gathering and rising as one into air,
dropping further along the beach to line up again.
Listening for the notes of Rhiannon’s birds, that refrain

far out on the horizon, I catch, closer, the sanderlings’ song,
an intermittent liquid sharpness through the hiss of the sea.
So it’s here that the enchantment is, on this beach
where I stand between worlds of rock and water,
in the half-heard call of birds from far arctic tundra
wintering on a coast where time ebbs under.

~*~

“...far out over the sea, their song was clear as if they were with them” 

The Birds of Rhiannon, from the Second Mabinogi.

On a Welsh Beach

M.C.Escher (Wikiart)

‘... dyuot tri ederyn, a dechreu canu udunt ryw gerd’

“... three birds came and began to sing a song to them, and all the songs they had ever heard before were unpleasing compared to that song. They had to look far out over the waves to see them but they were so clearly present to them as if they were with them.”

                               §

                     Birds of Rhiannon singing, where sea meets sky,

                     A shifting border at the merging of worlds

                     Their littoral music like the tides on the shore

                     Ebbing and flowing onto the land, into the air;

                     Cloudscapes of sound, now drifting, now clear

                     Like the horse she rides: now here, now there;

                     The boundaries of time, of place, don’t cohere

                     On the island of Gwalës on the sea, in the air.

                      The company holds in a vision somewhere,

                      A blissful communion, a binding of hearts,

                      Until a hand reaches out to open the door

                      And the song melts away in a breaking wave

                      So the land and the sea and the sky

                      Take their place in the world once more.

                                       §

“When they looked through the door all the losses they had ever suffered fell upon them ..... as if they were waiting to meet them.”

Quotations from the Second Branch of the Mabinogi. The company returning from Ireland with the head of Brân spend eighty years on the Island of Gwalës, though when they return they are no older and no time has passed in the world they left to go to the island.