Soul Light

Out on the bog the heron's wingbeat
Fractures the waters below disturbing
It's mirror image so that I know
That life transcends death, though

The reflection is no longer there
As the bird lifts away from water
Into air, its other element but one
Where its soul life is clouded

As the sky is as if empty unlike
The otherness of water which contains
An other self and depths that swirl
Beneath the glitter of sunlight, soul light

Within the pond's absorption of the
Spectrum of the rainbow so that
Only a clear greyness shimmers
In the wind's fanning of quiescent fire.

Water

So I have studied streams , how they run along a field's edge and turn, to be joined, at a field's corner, by another; and how this runs on and itself, at the field's end, pours over a bank and falls into a wider stream swirling on to be joined, and then to join many more such streams converging towards a river.

Fields can be mapped like skin, its arteries feeding veins, then capillaries - thin threads of life blood infusing tissues, barely registering the throb of a pulse but streaming to the edges of fanned-out fingers and toes, a tongue and other intimate places, taking and paying tribute to the main body, diverging from the heart's spring.

Rivers that run, run from small streams, so it seems, not like the circulation of a body? But seeming conceals the flow of water through the land : vapour from water to air as clouds gather from river, stream, wet soil, the whiteness they wash from the ground below, the dark hue they adopt as they thicken to looseness.

The barometer falls, air pressure ceases to hold, water leaks out of cloud, out of air, vapour condenses to liquid and falls to the ground, Earth's bloodstream through the atmosphere, soaks to soil transnuding through each particle of sand and loam, running off clay into streams that well up from springs pulsing from deep below rock , through soil into the open air.

Dew Pond

Up on the hill, after rain, there’s a pond of clear water. Go again in Summer after a dry spell and it’s a grassy hollow in the earth with duckweed in muddy patches. Or on cloudy days, some small draining pools and soggy patches between the grassy tumps. It’s mysterious: this alchemy, collecting in its alembic moisture out of the air and distilling silver in a round bowl only for the hill to take it into itself again, feeding, perhaps, a bright spring and the stream running clear down through the woodland to the valley floor. Walking from place to place across the land I sometimes get this sort of misty vision of how all the different elements in a landscape are interconnected. In theory it should be possible to make a map of it all, marking the intersecting junctions of the web of life. But it would always be an abstract representation however complete and accurate. Never a real insight into both the intercalations and interconnections between each apparently individual thing: how they are at once both separate and connected.

The Dancing Pilgrimage of Water

" ...........                       The speech
of the shaman is locked in the water web
where rivers meet."

So writes Glenda Beagan in her poem 'Shaman' included in The Dancing Pilgrimage of Water, a book of photographs by Phil Cope and writings selected by Dewi Roberts. In a previous book Holy Wells: Wales, Phil Cope had included some poetry alongside his commentaries on the wells. Here the idea is that the creative writing and the photography are in balance and complement each other. The selection of writings ranges from the seventeenth century to the present, but with a strong representation from modern works.

When I received my copy of the book I soon realised that something had gone horribly wrong with the typesetting or the editing as my poem 'Trawsgoed' ends suddenly in mid sentence five lines from the end, but with a neat full stop seemingly indicating the end of the poem. I have since learned that I am not the only contributor to suffer in this way.

Be that as it may, the photographs are stunning and the texts accompanying them, including some translated from Welsh, all engage deeply with the flow of waters through, across, over and under the earth. There is much more that I could quote, but having started with Glenda Beagan's reflections on the confluence of the Elwy and the Clwyd, I'll end by following with her the flow of waters back through time:

" ...........                            Hear heavy wains,
the whining of horses, the voices in the dusk -
chill calls, that Norman French nasality,

Tegeingl mingling Mercian : vowels broadening,
lengthening, but never merging with the plaited water
nor interweaving on a loom of moisture.

The threads remain: sharp, several, sure."