River of my Youth

Sitting on the damp grass

by the river of my youth,

more a stream

to tell the truth, though as a child

it seemed bigger.

 

I’ve shrunk it in growing,

but still the gleam

carries magic from afar to far

away. I like how

it’ll never stop flowing

will always be here

when I’m gone; home, city-bound,

or dead, it’ll still be going,

always cool, wet, fish-full

and refreshing.

 

rolling small and obscure

under mature willows

through unremarkable fields.

Appreciated by dog walkers

and their wet dogs,

cider-quaffing pot-smoking

village idiots will lounge and litter its banks.

 

Small Huckleberry boys

will always scamper across

its plank bridges – fishing net in hand,

sunhat on head,

hunting the clawed monster crayfish

of the muddy bed.

 

And the occasional dreamer

quiet and aloof,

will sit, and take peace

from its ceaseless, winding,

sea-searching movement through the fields.

 

 

 

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Oneness Poem

The trees:

are beautiful,

green above the sheen of a clear stream

they’re swaying,

soaring zephyr-stirred

on a background of azure purity.

The unmovable: it’s evident,

in the smooth movement of the stream;

rolling, splish splash

in grass banks.

Up above: a glide of vapour;

white cloud benignly

shifts as sun

(God’s sun)

beams down,

his light bathing bathers.

Droplets depart mother river

splashed upwards they

glint before glistening

on skin.

They rinse clean skins of bodies,

that, once apart,

melt one-wards and meld

becoming boundless,

as boundaries disappear

so that together, here,

all are One.

And in this nature

this wildness of blue, brown, green

in the life-filled

brilliance of sparkling water’s sheen

all is one,

undivided,

The Unmovable

in motion –

One in the Oneness;

Nirvana.

This is a rewriting of a poem I wrote a few years ago after a spiritual experience I had after a rave in the Welsh mountains. The rave was a pretty dodgy techno party, frequented by the usual deadbeats and misfits of society that these events attract. Fun nevertheless, and located in a beautiful spot called Forest Coalpit in the Brecon Beacons. We stayed at the party until about 9am, by which time the sun was really scorching, and then drove a mile further up the track to a spot by a beautiful stream where we got out and had a dip. While there I had a very powerful sense of spiritual elation, brought on in part by a book I had been reading about religion and spiritualism (The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley – amazing book). The references to the ‘unmovable’, and ‘one in the oneness’ and ‘nirvana’ come from the theological writings I discovered through this book. Looking back, to suggest I attained nirvana is a bit pretentious – if I came anywhere near it it didn’t last, although I still remember the feeling I had.

This is the second rewriting of this poem, the first is on this blog and entitled ‘After the Party’, and is less high-flown.

After the Party

This is a new poem that I have written about an event that occurred a couple of years ago. After going to a forest rave in the Welsh hills (I think it was on the edge of the Brecon Beacons), a group of five of us took a little trip up a woodland track to a stream we knew about nearby. By the time we got there the sun was really blazing down, and everything around us seemed to be in a sort of hyper-colour. The sky was so blue and the trees so green, and the sound  and sheen of the stream seemed to lift me up to a higher level. There are some good pictures of the stream somewhere, but I can’t find them (EDIT: I found one, it’s posted below), so for now I have attached a picture of the party itself to this post.

There is also another poem, more spiritually inclined, that I wrote immediately after the event. I will post this next. Here is the newer poem:

 

 

The trees

they shimmered

as though under a watery sheen,

 

Green leaves glittering

in a gentle caress

of breeze through the river-run

valley.

 

Below them we clambered

naked on rocks

and splashed clear water onto grassy

banks.

 

The five of us,

two couples and I:

alone

but free,

we laughed as the droplets

rolled down our young skin.

 

The thumping of the party

left an hour hence,

sounded in the distance,

As we made ourselves clean;

sleepless and slippery in the morning sun.