We Remember You: Wroth Silver 2025

We Remember You 

Oh you spirits of the hedgerow,
Great & small, mostly unseen,
Sharp clawed, curled presences
Of feather & fur, scale & scape
Dark little eyes awoken before dawn today;
We remember you, we know you,
We think of you!

Oh you waves of winter birds
Come from the north, the east:
Redwing, fieldfare, woodcock, lapwing;
Dark duck, goose skein, starling,
Here you are again upon our fields, our hills & our pools;
We remember you, we know you,
We think of you!

Oh you forgotten ones,
Around your fires, feasting,
Watching the great winter come & go
Through millennia of the hunt,
Following the song lines of your & our ancestors;
We remember you, we know you,
We think of you!

Oh you drover-men of oxen
Faring far along the ridge-land
Road from before there were roads
Eyes searching the horizon, the woods edge,
For wolves, some of them human;
We remember you, we know you,
We think of you!

Oh you armies on the march
Come to conquer,
Kill or enslave the land-people,
With your leather boots & helmets,
With your shields & spears;
We remember you, we know you,
We think of you!

Oh you herders, tenant-farmers & parishioners
Going out of your way
To attend the gathering, to pay your dues
Some rising in the dark,
Some spending nights away from home;
We remember you, we know you,
We think of you!

Oh you stout men
With your boots & your pipes, 
Your breeches & hats, with your dogs at your feet,
Taking your breakfast,
Exchanging news, doing business at the table;
We remember you, we know you,
We think of you!

Oh you twentieth century people
Who came on your bikes & in your buses & cars
In your overcoats & wellies
To stand upon the hill
& celebrate your heritage;
We remember you, we know you,
We think of you!

We are the fortunate ones
Free to choose how & where & when we assemble here
To come, go & speak as we please
Our freedoms hard won for us 
By those who fought for them before us;
We remember you all, we know you all,
We think of you all, we thank you all!

Wroth Silver!

This is my twelfth offering as the Wroth Silver Bard! It is a great honour & a pleasure. To read my previous Wroth Silver poems & find out more about this unique & ancient event follow these links:

http://www.wrothsilver.org.uk/
2014: Martinmas
2015: The Road of Time
2016: Wheel of the Year, Wheel of the Land
2017: Eight Decades
2018: Ghosts
2019: Throw a Penny in the Hollow of the Stone 
2020-21 Dear Ancestors
2022: The End of an Era
2023: In the Picture, Making History 
2024: The Knight Within the Low

The Unseen Made Seen

 

My new pamphlet of poetry is out now! Thirty poems spanning ten years with a sort of theme.

Trees, whales, blood & black holes; sulphur, uranium & carbon; lost friends & beloved music.

Find out more & buy it here.

 "I was repeatedly gripped and surprised by its poems. Daring at an almost Swinburnian floridity, these are always ‘hymns’ and never songs, chanted under a sky that is ever 'darkening' if it is there at all. The poems pulse and seethe with a rare voluptuousness. The literary equivalents of swirling synths, both alchemy and early Tangerine Dream serve as objective correlatives for their metaphors; these poems clamour at meaning, are swept away by the surge of their own diction only to be swept back in on an urge to connect... For these poems are suffused with the kind of generous vision that sees a dancer rather than a corpse, spurns the inhibitions of the fear-cravers, and takes time to sit with a “horned godling”. What others see as obstacles, these poems open as doorways."

From the introduction by Phil Smith, author of Albion's Eco-Eerie, Temporal Boundary Press.

"A song amongst the noise. A poet whose words you feel as well as read. When I read Patterson's poetry and prose it makes me realise why I fell in love with poetry as he makes the world-scapes dance and shine brighter by the way he writes."

Anthony Owen, author of Post Atomic Glossaries: New & selected poems, Broken Sleep Books.

"I love Barry Patterson's poetry! It is full of guts and energy: wonderfully vivid and powerful imagery, coupled with depth and a profound connection to life. I just can't put this collection down!" 

Philip Carr-Gomm, author of Druid Mysteries, Rider.

2007: The Final Cave

For the people of Tingri, whom I met long ago. The recent earthquake  raises many thoughts about them, prayers for them, & the power places that they guard.

 

 

The Final Cave

 

Ten of us in the truck & some holding onto the outside bash our way across the desert that is Tibet.

We've learned the secret language of rocks, sand & all the shades of what is usually called brown.

Stained another earthy shade by tradition's regolith, we smell of burned juniper & butter fat.

We sing through the violence of our passage, heads throbbing in time with the molecules of the tune.

Most of us can't see outside the truck too well as it bounces down dry river bed miles of stones.

  

 

First village: find someone who knows the man who knows where we can find the final cave;

Second village: find someone who knows the man with a key to unlock the door to the final cave;

Third village: find the man with the key & persuade him to come with us without getting lost.

We see through our pain, sing mantras built out of oxygen atoms, noiseless in the brain's light.

The truck bumps & lurches its way across the salt spiked, sun flashed plain of the Sakyas. 

Out there in the badlands somewhere there is a ruined gompa with a huge willow tree growing by it.

There must be land marks, but all we can see out of the back of the truck most of the time is sky.

Sometimes snow-capped Himalaya guarding the high plateau's edge & calling us back to our other life. 

 

Sing on through the final headache, the price of this journey is pain, brain-bones rattled roadless.

Mind filled by aspiration prayers whose words unknit the storylines of inner & outer worlds.

It's really high & the final walk up a gentle path makes geriatrics of us all, past  piles of mani stones.

Ahead, ruined walls splashed with vivid ochre paint on white lime & a tree festooned with scarves;

 

 

Scarves dangle from the cave's holy, holed roof, the old men light butter lamps & we all sit together.

Machigma & Padampa were here, a thousand years ago, we've read the story many times.

 

 

 

Dave leads the practice.

We sing.

Time stops.

Words stop.

Pain is gone.

We're silent & still together.

Om.