You are within me,
I am within You
when our hearts
share a beat.
Allow not the fog,
the noise to obscure
the shared beat
of our hearts,
to separate us.
Let me not be lost!
Let us remain one
in stillness and patience,
in joy and in ecstasy,
supremest terror,
in life and in death,
forever and ever,
Heart of my Heart.
the mountains would stop talking to each other,
the hills would lose their nerve and flee,
the rivers would stop rushing down,
turn their tides to the source,
vanish back to Annwn,
and the sea, oh the vast sea!
The mournful waves would lose their songs,
the sea-horses their nostrils of foam and proud crests.
Water would be water no longer and salt would not be salt.
There would be nothing to quench our thirst or cleanse our wounds.
With the marching trees we would be rootless vagabonds
for the snakes beneath our houses and the serpents
beneath our towerblocks would shake
the foundations tear them down.
The animals would run away
through the caves and cracks in the earth
and all the fish would disappear into the Lune Deep
and the birds would fly away on the winds before the sky
did his thing of crashing down like a fallen bird or a fallen wrestler.
If Your heart ceased to beat oh Gatherer of Souls,
would our hearts too not cease to beat?
Then who would gather us?
Oh lonely lonely souls!
Grateful are we that on the moment
of Your death Your heart skips but one beat
then continues to beat in Your sleep and in Your dreams.
*A poem for Gwyn ap Nudd on Calan Mai when He loses His battle for Creiddylad to Gwythyr and ‘dies’ and retreats to Annwn to sleep for the summer.
For Gwyn
I.
In the May Snow
I mourn for you.
Crack willow take
my soul again
to the raven’s
places of Annwn,
to where the bones
are old and grey.
II.
In the cold castle
lies your tomb
and on its corners
stand four cranes
to coax your soul
from death and gloom,
to sing you back
to life again.
Will the seasons continue to turn?
Will your battle still commence?
In these days of plague when
we need you so much
will you depart
to the land of the dead
to sleep in your cold castle
in Annwn?
~
The seasons must turn.
My battle must commence
and my death-blow must be struck.
Yet when I die you will see my ghost
and when I sleep I will sleepwalk.
Many will see the wolf of my soul.
Through these days of plague
I will guide the dead.
This poem is addressed to my patron god, Gwyn ap Nudd, on Calan Mai. Today Gwyn (Winter’s King) battles against Gwythyr (Summer’s King) for Creiddylad, a goddess of spring and flowers, and is destined to lose and return to sleep in the Castle of Cold Stone, in Annwn.
The Cell of Sister Patience 