A harsh guffaw summoning the dawn, a penitent crow caws. Awakened by tremulous cheeps, warbling and murmuring water, the wetland emerges from sleep. Leaves shadow trunks, stippled with light, spring’s exhaled by trees, dispelling the big freeze.

A Game of Thrones KeepPowis Castle is a Grade I listed country home in northern Wales overlooking the town of Welshpool. The first glimpse of Powys Castle is truly breathtaking as the red sandstone façade seems to rise dramatically from the surrounding landscape.

I find that writing poetry can often be an act of meditation. This poem attempts to describe that wonderful unknowable feeling that comes with a successful meditation and expresses what meditation means to me.I can't really describe it any better than the poem does, so I shall let the poetry do the talking 😉

Title image modified using a picture by Pexels from PixabayStanding like warriors in the mist - in bamboo forest emptiness. In my heartbeat's settling breath, death's promise, undoing. Messianic in growth, bamboo wood-grass measures time in partitions. Sifting mana from soil, soul from sap. I elapse into your wanton growth collapse into bamboo mazes of mind, in observance I merge with you, I find quiet.

Image by Enrique Meseguer from PixabaySwitched On That itch I couldn't scratch. That exploratory moment between life and death. That lazy neuron - an open book without a binding. That switch that remained always on reminding me of my inability to let it go. That constant hum of the through-flow of thought, endless. That low level thrum, omnipresent in its unavoidable chatter. That pitter-patter of cognitive noise. That deadly stochastic mess of the ego and the ID. That leftover-meal brain, not quite sane, not quite in, perpetually switched to a full-on cacophonous din. That endless criticism, sermonizing rhetoric of self-hate. That closed door, un-flicked switch. That slammed gate.

Photo by Markus Spiske on UnsplashThe past is an abandoned quarry, granite memory painted in stone, smattered with gorse and tidying tits twittering around a rust-crusted lorry. Their talk is all elemental, of wind and the availability of worms, the baking heather in summer's clay earth womb, the sky.