Five Denials on Merlins Grave, by Robin Williamson. As close to the bards art as youre likely to come. This is long and you should seek out the recording, or watch it on YouTube: https://youtube/watch?v=iuRUVzqAfgk. However, he mumbles, and so ... FIVE DENIALS ON MERLINS GRAVE myself, a brat who vaguely gazed on the knee high nineteen forties and the waist high nineteen fifties and couldnt figure numbers worth a damn was always a chancer and given three lines to add Id put the middle row down as the answer but I would read all day if I could get away with it and all night too with a flashlight under covers of that Green Man my namesake, or of Merlin of the borders and in seeking out the stories of Britains ancient lineage I delved on days subtracted from the blackboards paltry tyrannies among dog eared authorities, back shelved in libraries who barked at point blank dogmatically lacking their bell and candle into my eyes at daydream from a skull. among the glamoured fields of fine July I lazed to read and revel through these pleadings in dead language yardages of verbiage in the ravelled case of the comings and the goings in the high and far off times stacked and dried. wherein it is recounted with clerkish severity fish spearing, wizened, louts without modesty displaying a crude cunning that might pass as perspicacity beehived and coracled among our western isles while Noah was still flattening his thumbs, and bending nails. these people we so glibly call the Picts whatever thoughts they voiced in hamitic vocables whatever shades they prized, what light or dapple refract; maligned with daubs of woad in patronizing words. for they were clean as clams, witty and thick as thieves gossiping rnaskers worthy of serious love, sticklers for detail furred with wolf pity, honeyed as the claws of bears tree truthful looters along times inches shooting a barefaced line, secretive as heather ale, with leagues of breeding brewing or brooding or brave enough in a pinch charting and outstaring the vagaries of heaven from winters prick to the crack of summer kept watch upon the Pleiades calendaring from months of feathered dawns just seasons for the eagle and the wren owning red breasted lazarus laughter no better or worse than we as babes swim back in time, gilled and goggle eyed evolving as now, intelligent as the green sea that bloods to Egypt, India, and China fathoming forgotten simplicities. it is written bland as boiled cabbage such savages were heaving out their oyster shells all up and down the miles of Britain since first the ice receded to the northern wastes scouring our hills as round as breasts until the time of Noahs brother, Partholon whose children haggling like gulls mysteriously arose from Sicily some say herdsmen pipers quenching away through thirsty south Italy and wending westward on at the drone of cattle talk, fly hummed and bitten by finger quick and cream fat moons breaking new sod for barley seed with wooden plows and rooting for wild garlic with spades of antler bone. but let us sing the skill of the master builders long ago for it was no peasantry clodding after scrawny cows who raised the hollow hills and henge stones but calm and cunning wizards worked these wonders continuing the snail line, dod flat at ring stand ruling scribing and pegging out in granite the windings of the dragon track that writhes unhewn in sward and marsh and moss and meadowland that twines in stellar gravity among the eaves of the cubic sky serpent bird of Hy Brassail force of spring wing sunk bound free as we perceive our dream at centrifugal spin so green leaves grow the rowan bears the crown so they, upon the veins of Anu, blazed the eye of Bel to print a spell of glory in our blinks of lives rightness of the world self seen the green the garden and poetry attests their artistry thus and otherwise older yet and wiser far and I will not forget. it is recounted with an absence of drollery next came copper workers with wheels and carpentry from the land of the Greeks, drunken by starlight north through the Daneland heroing and charioteering and breaking bones like crockery with their brown swords. but let us sing these rovers homesick for sights unseen and sounding for the sake of the silence between the stars and garnering an elder lore within their druldry for so bore Nuada of the Silver Hand, master of the elements into Alba into Erin the quest of the Seat Perilous and of the White Bulls Spotted Hide to make and unmake the demons of the mind to fly honouring the unvisionable Dagda and Mananan of the Letters in the Craneskin and shining Lug of the Ways of the world the garden and carrying always within, as is fitting the shadowlit whispering marefaced catfaced owlfaced ageless huntress and thrice queen who musing in the blood whistles and whirls her hounds and ravens, beyond all sacrifice craven and unrhyming, nailed in a blackthorn tree lest horned eyes be blinded by the tomb of the lightlessness in the charm of the halcyon dark. on this, our grave and Christian clerics in alarm avert their pens womenless men crooked in the cloister of their age but poetry declares it differently older yet and lovelier far, this mystery and I will not forget. the next wave brought the flaxen sons of Mil as it is writ by stuffy hermits with a bone to pick blundering up the Danube and down the Rhine the warrior forefathers of the Gael who shipped and sailed deep waters at wind beck one arm one hand one finger prowing west across to Spain round France and through the Channel plundering the coastlands as they came till they too brought their reign into the glens the horsemen of Muimnon of the Gold. but let us chime in the heather blue of their two handed harpers spiralling from red and silver wires tones of the faces that speak from jurassic rock with eyes like leaves a winding music keening and exultant through the green drum of the hills, the white briar rose and the long dance of the horses cantering in threes high and lonesome reel that galloped in the duple hoofbeat sharp as the blade of January and soft as snow, their minstrelsy that kissed and parted and found rest in journeying they rode and billowed in the days of old worshipping across the world a music that nests in bird song, insinuates in river babble sings in the soft south wind and burns in the burning flame to lay a burden and a turn that catch still at the heart and descant yet to the echo of that oldest tune of all, that stirs the bold and I will not forget. and lastly it is told, and quaveringly by generals doddering in their second infancy that in the days of Darius before Christs birth six hundred years Labraid the Exile came pillaging and slaughtering as if to prove Darwin right with his darkbrowed Gauls and their leaf shaped spears. I hate the scribblers who only write of war and leave the glory of the past unsung between the lines but sadly and truly on the sinister left hand the tale of Britain since the Flood is of crowing and croaking war that gouged heart high a fame that soaked away that maimed all vision spilt jewels both red and white killed memory and might turned amethyst to adamant lamenting in the reed, the wound horn, the tolling bell brother killers the salt sea it is salt with tears a wave flooding without an ebb toppling stone from story before ever Caesars lawful butchers came or riddling Saxons setting flame to thatch or rune wise Vikings whirling blood wet axes or courtly Normans cutting off of hands and the burning church jingling in pardoners prate of Hell, as pedants munched their roasted meat dumped off a fear of Spirit on the heap as if one life was all. but long before we ever took the names of English, Scottish, Welsh, or Irish and long before the tower of Babel fell and language cracked there was interchange and colloquy and conversation upon this world and standing stones remain to bear it testimony from China to the Americas, and from India to Ireland, patterning. still sings the salmon louder in the wild deers lung above and below all weir the Green Man makes his play and in a schoolboys hands that cupped that water Merlin of the borders turned in his river grave where Powsail Burn meets Tweed the wild bees hummed a brown bull grazing in the meads a seeming peace, a soft summers day where I first read, and reading, saw the paper dissolve away. and I say now years later, well mindful of the risk of mockery that nothingness 1 am was then set a wandering upon the windings of the ways of the world the garden restless in life and seeking no end in death for breath of the ages in the face of the air still ghosts to the vitality of our most early and unwritten forebears whose wizardry still makes a lie of history whose presence hints in every human word who somehow reared and loosed an impossible beauty enduring yet among the green islands of the grey north sea and I will not forget. 1978, 1979 Robin Williamson All Rights Reserved
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 06:21:20 +0000