so, we’re in the third week now of the first round of encant — my eight-week online poetry course — and it’s beautiful.

It feels like, at last, we can talk about poetry and explore poetry and write poetry that is something other than, more than, simply ‘art’ — we’re building a practice of poetry that’s entangled with the spirit world, that is a connection to the Otherworld, that honours the personhood of inner and outer worlds. I love it. It’s a delight and an honour to be working with the two current groups.

So that we have good time to get the next cohorts into place for the second round of encant, beginning in September, I’ve now listed tickets for the second round. Each cohort has 15 paid places and 3 bursary/scholarship places. All the details are on my website on the encant page here.

If you’re curious about a poetics that’s rooted in our innate sense of a pre-modern Home, which honours our dislocation and homesickness for a life truly enmeshed in the vibrant matrices of the living worlds, and which aims to shape energy through language that makes the spirits sit up and gather, encant might well be the place for you.

Nine of the fifteen paid places are already taken for the cedar (UK morning) cohort and dogwood (UK evening) is filling fast, too. Don’t hesitate for too long, and don’t be shy of asking for a scholarship/bursary if you need one. I’d love to meet you in the encant-space soon!

Find out more about encant

Here’s an unedited recording of me in the woods a few weeks ago, talking to you — my imagined friend — about what encant is about. I think it probably says it better than any amount of fancy slides and webpages can. I haven’t listened back, mind you, so I could be very wrong! Either way, I hope to meet you somewhere soon.

With love and prayers for you and your close-people’s good health and grace

Tom

Enough of that. Here’s the poem:

The piece is from AT THE ORPHANS’ DOOR, but I reworked the ending a little in the early hours of this morning. I’m not 100% sure it’s right yet, but I’m pretty sure I’m getting clearer about what ‘better’ means, so that’s some kind of progress, I believe. Apologies to those who love the original, but rest assured that it’s safe and unharmed in an undisclosed location. Also, all my books are ⅓ off in the Feral Angels Press bookshop until probably about Tuesday.

I wish you all some extraordinary joy at the solstice; or at the very least, a little respite at the turning point of this strange and spindled existence. It’s also Fathers’ Day here in the UK, which I hope is a joyous thing if you are a father, or have a father to celebrate — I know it’s not so simple for many people, too, so I send love to you if that’s the case.

Whatever your day is and however life finds you, I wish you all the good things: strong rememberings of what’s important and alive in your bones, and the grace and power to rise up against those powers that keep us all from liberation.

From the moor-edge, with love

Tom

But, to the matter at hand. Lights glimpsed across the waters in which hungry bear-ghosts swim

I come back to this quickly-written piece every so often, shuddering a little, and yet I like the claustrophobic menace of it, and the call for genuine connection and recognising one another across the silence and madness still holds true.

So, while the Gypsy Kings blares fairly relentlessly around me and the other tables come and go, I’ve been trimming and tucking and squeezing in some more language to see how it fares with my attention today.

I don’t know.

Here’s the new version:

Lights glimpsed across the waters in which hungry bear-ghosts swim [June 2026 version]


Not only deep, but thick with dead bears’ teeth –
Yellow, crooked, hungry – this darkness
	around us now.

Their jawbones are white as constellations –
Sharp as the keening of my unloved ancestors –
In the deep thick dark through which I swim
In these small and empty hours,
As tiny as a glimpse of hope.

Not a boat to be seen, or a ship,
Or even the great head of a giant
	above the waterline;
Water laps at my ears in the small dark
Hours so thick and deep with 
The death of everything I love,
		all life, and time.

The white bear bones and the jagged bear teeth
Lurch in the water towards me
And the water glows with malice,
And the endless longing of our neglected ghosts.

These are the depths we’re in;
This is the black-watered sea.
All the skeletons of our forgetting
Have the scent of us and are closing now,
Fast and hungry in the brine.

So, in this teeth-thick, deep-dead
Dark, I am sustained by what light I see.
Now is no time to shy away from any bright beholding,
		however close or far.

If I see your face across the deadening water,
I will steer towards you as I swim.
Come close. Be warmed; and warm me.
In this great dying-time, my nose for life
Is as keen as a fox or a dog alive
Again to the hum and stink of this world
Still spinning within disaster.

The angles of my pursuers tighten
Towards me. Will we risk greeting
One another within this extremity? 
Surely we risk a greater darkness
With our formidable reserve, the
Formality that has brought us to
The bear-dark dead-thick sea
And this extinction
	of our hearts.

and this is the original, from May 2023, when the world felt quite different and quite the same.

Lights glimpsed across the waters in which hungry bear-ghosts swim [May 2023 version]


Not only deep, but thick with dead bears' teeth —
Yellow, crooked, hungry — this darkness around us now.

Their jawbones are white as constellations,
Sharp as the keening of my unloved ancestors,
In the deep thick dark through which I swim
In these small and empty hours,
As tiny as a glimpse of hope.

Not a boat to be seen, or a ship or the
Great head of a giant above the waterline;
Water laps at my ears in the small dark
Hours so thick and deep with the death
Of everything: hope, love, all life, and time.

The white bear bones and the jagged bear teeth
Lurch in the water towards me
And the water glows with malice,
And the endless longing of unbeloved ghosts.

This is the sea we’re in.
This is the black-watered sea
And all the skeletons of our forgetting
Have the scent of us and are closing.

So, in this teeth-thick, deep-dead
Dark, I am sustained by what light I see.
Now is no time to shy away from any bright
Recognition, however close or far.

If I see your face shine across the deadening water,
I will steer towards you as I swim.
Come in. Warm me; be warmed.
In this great death, my nose for life
Is as keen as a fox or a dog coming
Alive again to the hum and stink of a world
Still spinning within disaster.

The angles of my pursuers tighten
Towards me. Will we risk greeting
One another in the language of this
Extremity? Or risk greater darkness
With our formidable reserve, the
Formality that has brought us to
The bear-dark dead-thick sea
And the extinction of our hearts.

What do you think?

Better now? Or not?

And — most importantly (for our practice as poets) — by what measures? What is ‘good’ and what’s ‘not good’? What do we mean? I obviously have my intentions for the piece, and I can only vaguely describe them, but I have values, of course. Does it do what I would like it to do? Does it do that better than the silence of its absence?

The rain continues. The Gypsy Kings continue their rotation. I abide in the discomfort of both working as a writer and working as a machine-adjacent surf. I wave across the water and — maybe — swim for land.

Keep faith in the power of language and see you in the sea or on the strand.

Tom

*about encant: it’s an eight-week course in the kind of poetics I teach and aspire to bring to my work. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, so let me share these few slides that give a taster. I’ll be running two class-groups from the beginning of July (one in the morning — UK time — and one in the evening) and taking bookings from next week. If you’re interested, ping me back a message expressing your interest and I’ll put you on the advance-notice list. I think places might go quickly, as it’s going to be f$£%ing brilliant. This is just a quick pointer about it, as I’m focused on bear-thick waters right now, but I thought it’d be remiss of me to not mention it.

Since my current assistant — the very excellent — has taken up residence on the other side of the world, we’ve tried to keep her work as my assistant going, but it’s just too complicated. So, we’re parting ways and I’m on the look-out for a new assistant. Might it be you?

I’m looking for someone (probably local to Dartmoor/south Devon, or at least able to travel here on a semi-regular basis) to help with things like:

• listing events on my website

• helping arrange in-person events and the occasional podcast

• dealing with workshop queries

• doing follow-up admin after workshops

• sending recordings of mentoring meetings

• answering some of the email queries I get
  helping me stay on track with projects through a weekly meeting

• perhaps assisting me with putting together some poetry-teaching videos

Nothing too arduous and nothing too specialised. I need someone with good communication skills and an ease with the back-end of websites. A knack for good organising is essential. And a patience for my sometimes-chaotic ways of working (which might not be that chaotic, in truth, but seem like it at the moment.) Graphics skills for putting together images for events like the Feral Angels’ Poetry Café would be needed (I use GIMP and Scribus, but those aren’t essential) and if you’re able to help sometimes with larger online events and maybe in-person ones too, that’d be a good thing, for sure.

Mostly, I need someone to help me keep on top of messages and online events. The rest may be negotiable. My basic situation is that I’ve got too much to do and not enough hours or ergs of energy to get it all done, having reached the limits (a long time ago) of what one person can do. There’s also change ahead as my work with Feral Angels Press and Clarion evolve and the teams involved expand, which should reduce my workload and allow me to concentrate more on writing, editing and teaching.

In all honesty, I don’t know how much time a week this would take — certainly not more than one day a week at this stage. I pay fairly — there’s holidays and sick pay —and we’d have clear agreements about responsibilities and powers.

So, if you think you might just be my new assistant, click the button below to send a message with some information about you, and a CV or the like, and why you’d like the role and why you think you’d be great at it, and I’ll set up some calls over the next few weeks. Or just email me the same at assistant@tomhirons.com with [ASSISTANT JOB] in the subject line.

Hopefully, it’ll work out joyously for both of us. Go on. Don’t be shy. (And please don’t move to New Zealand? Please?!?)

Each year, I host a one-off pay-what-you-like three-hour online workshop exploring the very best of what I think this poetry-writing malarkey is all about, and particularly what I’ve learned in the past year and what I’m currently working with in the bumpy fields of Poetics.

There’s a lot I’m thinking about. The session will be a balance of conversation and exercises. If time permits, we’ll look at some of the work you all bring, too, and see what we can learn. The space is generous, kind, supportive and always aiming to bring out the best in your work. You can attend without speaking or sharing - there’s no pressure, only invitation.

Themes this year are likely to include, but not be limited to:

- Poetry as the wild language of our non-modern selves
- Practices of listening (what is the subtle world whispering? what is the song in our bones?)
- Practices of encanting* (how to put those words in the right order?)
- Practices of distillation (a rough guide to how I edit work?)
- Poetry as an energetic practice
- Poetry as resistance against the shitification of everything, including the Devourer and the endless intrusion of tech...

It’ll be recorded, so if you miss the call, you'll receive a link to watch it at your leisure! There will be a break, and opportunities to move around.

May 23rd · 2-5pm UK time (UTC+1)
Price: from FREE to £75. You choose.

This is the workshop in which I give it everything I've got. I’d love for you to join me.

All the details are on my website - click the button below.
And please spread the word!

Find out more and book your place

* encanting is a new word, one I’m testing out as no other word seems to quite fit. Somewhere between incanting and enchanting. The act of putting words to energetic shapes, perhaps… Or of laying down ropes of language, between the writer and the reader, or between the Otherworld and this middle world. Between flint and stars?

I don’t go a bundle on Christian mythology, as you may have gathered if you follow my work, but I do like Easter. When I lived in Greece, it was my favourite mad festival, and these days, the feast of it still feels powerful and rightly-located in the year, for all that I relish neither overpriced chocolate eggs or regurgitation of Christian stories that are largely shorne of their pre-Christian lifeforce. You’ll find plenty elsewhere about the origins of the Easter story and even the name of Easter, but this piece from Falconer’s Joy (now sadly out of print*) is my addition to the canon of work around surrender, death and resurrection.

Is there a piece of mine I love as much as this one? Hard to say. Sometimes a Wild God, of course, occupies its own space. This was proper graft over a number of years and is good true-speaking, as well as a love-letter to a place on the moor that holds my imagination in mysterious ways down the years now.

*I’d love to reissue Falconer’s Joy - it has some fine pieces in, so if you’ve a few spare thousand quid, do let me know…

MERRIVALE
A remembering, in seven parts

I.

In the granite bed where I sleep,
There lies a bear whose breath is the rise
And fall of stars between these
Rough rows of stone.

The bear’s mouth is the October sky,
As hungry as a cave in the mountains,
As black as the water in a dream
In which you fell and died, then lived
To tell the tale, remade from your remains.

I place the only copy of my dog-eared life
Into the broken kist of the Great Bear’s mouth
And it leans out of the heaving night to
Eat the boy and man I’ve been,
Sleeps again with my dreams churning,
Hollow and restless in its ever-pregnant,
Ever-aching belly of the night. 

Hail, Merrivale, my bed of stone and stars.
Here, I’ll rest my memories and no other
Story will have a fast hold of me now.


II.

Speak to me in the language of Moss and Stone:
The brook and fox-den know well my
Mother-tongue. Let us be clear: 

This Moor-language sings sweeter in my ear
Than all the songs I ever heard from angels,
Clear and beautiful as they were.
I tell you no lie, not here. I could not,
For all my skill in falsity.

This peat-brown water,
These rain-stacked stones;
Oaks both mighty and small.
That stream-crouched May
Beneath which I sleep so deeply
And forget and remember my most
Noble and ignoble truths.

Here are granite avenues; here is the sky above Earth;
The stone-wrought lines in which the ages live,
Not forgotten, by me, tonight at least. Not quite. 

This Bear has been stalking my life.
Sweet as a knife, warm as night,
Kind as a wounding and deadly as the hour
In which I dream my last great dream.
I bare my neck to the blades of
Remembering and forgetting.


III.

Once or twice, when my spine was made of birch,
When the fire in my head was a fire in my belly,
I fell up into the sky of trees and there
Among the green leaves of oak and ash,
I found the runes and learned true speech. 

Because of this good fortune, I know my rightful name,
Though the fortune was not easily won and the road
Towards my name is a path of hunger and sorrow. 

But see, now, am I a bird or a song
Or a stone-bound dreamer?
Truly, I am a swallow in flight;
I am a dour man of England;
I am the river-stalker,
And I am both the blacksmith
And his chains. 

I cannot read the Galaxy,
But I know the language of tree,
Leaf and the cross-branched sky.
I know the speech of secrets;
I know the stone-lined path and
I have taken the long way home.

My brow-star is only just beginning to rise.
Attend to the voice in which I spoke truly:

Show me who you are when
The Great Bear has eaten
All your words.


IV.

This, then, is the calling I ignored,
The enemy with whom I would not engage. 

This is the place I remembered,
But to which I would not return.
Prodigal and penitent, I pray truly:
Hold me tight and close enough
That memory returns and stays
Right in my remembering.

My seven sisters wait, wiser
Than my brothers in star-Lore,
But not that of stream or tree
Or of the grey stones, now as
Fixed in my geography as a coast
Or a birthplace or a grave. 
I was at the battle where the great shout was made;
I advised the army in that significant moment:
Help me recollect precisely
The weapons we employed then and
The banners to which we rallied.

How did we find hope enough
To take to the field
Though our enemies were myriad
And impervious to all our arms?
How did we face the dark
And our certain death and yet,
Somehow, prevail?

Hail, Merrivale, where I fought and
Fell that day and lived again.
Time, tide nor all the flooding sea
Will keep me from you now.


V.

Young as I was in those giddy days,
I believed the fable of unending flight,
Fleet-footed, bright-winged,
Agile as a sprite or a swift,
Weightlessly becoming God.

I wrought havoc in the shadow
Of my hawk-shaped flight,
Became not light, but a bearer
Of insubstantial promises and the folly
Of those who lose the Earth
And forget the shape of their own
Feet in the darkness. 

In lesser days than the great hours,
I writhed in the ties of this life,
As stubborn as a fly or a bolt stuck fast,
As graceless as a faltering foot.

When gravity claimed me,
I made a slower, sadder story:
An agent of the light-flecked,
Dark-cracked jackdaw.
A dappled servant of complexity,
One foot in the bright-shining heaven,
One foot in the King’s stone of Dùn Ad,
No longer golden, but dark as
Silver in the ashes of the forge.

The Bear made a feast of all those I wronged,
All those I loved and all who stood by.
Each one in their time has trodden
That pathway of stone and stars.

Was I closer to God and love through
My mistakes or through my triumphs?
Who’s to say? Not I, and the Bear
Is silent and no one else can know.

A hawk cries out in the dark hour,
Hungry and homeless as a saint.
The water in the thin leat sings
Its song of endless, hopeless hope.

The Bear splays its crooked claws and
Reaches out into the dense-tongued darkness
To deliver all our victories against deception.


VI.

It was a dark day, that Easter
And our child, unborn, our first.

We sat in your shadow,
Adrift in our distress.
We climbed King’s Tor,
Knew the world was good,
Though we could not feel it.
Aged with grief,
Cut out of innocence,
We were bereft.
I don’t know another place
That could have held us. 

Hail, Merrivale.
This time, I will not forget.


VII.

Three horses,
A skewbald foal as fresh as dawn.
A score or so of sheep
Bleating in the hill-dew.
A wagtail on a finger of rock.
An immense Bear, asleep,
Stretching its arms in the stars.
 
The high moor is calling;
They have uncovered the queen
With the knotted hair,
And the king is sleeping
In the black-bird’s eye.
Now is not the time for silence. 

The chill wind cuts.
The hard ground bites;
The mist becomes rain and I,
A mortal man with
Aching legs and heavy arms,
Awaken to the thin daybreak light. 

I will learn to speak with the bear’s tongue;
I will tell my story from the stone-mouth of the kistvaen;
I will learn again to walk the long way home.

I rise and step towards my life,
Daring in this damp dawn to trust
That not all things worth loving are lost.
Another star is rising on the pale horizon
And the moon has yet to sing.

Hail, Merrivale;
I remember;
I believe;
I begin.

Poets have always been a vital part of countercultural and resistance movements. We’re interested in the role of the Warrior-Poet; not one or the other, but believing in a way of being that inhabits both, or exists in the territory from which both images arise.

We are honouring the urgency of these times by being explicit in our belief that there is a Devouring force loose in the world. This camp is action towards Defying the Devourer, and medicine against despair, including the active principle of using power and privilege effectively, as well as engaging the tools of poetics in the rising seas of horror.

Warrior Poet Rebel Assembly is our offering to cultivate community among warrior poets*, to help us find and sustain each other in our efforts. It is a place where each of us can bring what we are interested in and offer our piece in a holographic map of collective knowledge and experience.

The site is a gorgeous off-grid project in rural Cornwall, not far from Mên-an-Tol and other ancient sites.

We intend that you’ll come out the other side of WPRA 26 inspired and sustained, with renewed warrior-poet vigour and sense of purpose, and more skills for engaging with the struggles of which you are part.

We’ll be hanging out together in a beautiful and relatively wild space, cooking together and sharing meals (should you wish to) and digging deep during the day and then letting our hair down at night. Everything on offer will be invitation - none of it is compulsory.

More than anything, though, this is an opportunity to spend time with kindred poetic spirits and explore ways of using our poetry more effectively as acts of genuine activism and resistance.

See my website for more details. including the sliding scale pricing and accommodation options. It’s going to be a very beautiful thing. I’d love to meet you there.

Find out more about WPRA 26

* Are you a ‘warrior poet’? Maybe you are, maybe you’d like to be. See the website for more about that.

The Syllable

What was it you said to me, when we first met?
I cannot remember now if it was a thousand
years ago or one, but in that moment,
the rest of my life fell behind me.

I turned and walked towards you
and dropped all other distractions.
All these lives later, I am still walking, 
still as lost in love as the moment 
that first syllable arrived at my ear,
so terrible and so sweet.

I don’t recall what language you were speaking;
you might have been a cloud or a bird or a song.
It was your voice that inspired this longing
and my ear became loyal only to you.

It took me all this time to find you;
I mistook others for you, constantly
and I will make the same mistake forever,
in the street, at my window, in my dream,
There you are! And there!
Over there! And there!

I have thrown nets and made traps for you.
You have slipped through the finest mesh
and skipped from one snare,
slipped from another.
I cannot hold you.
A fool, but constant in my devotion,
I learned only slowly how to court you
with these praise-songs I am making,
by speaking your name sideways in the world.

What was it you said?
In that syllable is the secret I came for,
this longing that pulls me through all the worlds,
through all heavens and all hells.
My tongue is a clumsy tool
with which to praise you.
My heart, though, is as eloquent as
the blackbird in the hedge at dusk,
naming all the secret things
of the world in its song.

Great-hearted mistress.
Endlessly, I move towards your body
of bones and stones and stars.
In your eyes are the secrets of all the fires;
in your womb are all the children of every universe;
in your blood, all the memories of this world.

I am coming to you, dear Lady.
My feet are tired, but I keep walking.
Every step of the way towards you,
I am singing love songs,
each one an echo of that first syllable 
you whispered in my ear.

If you enjoy this piece, you might like the rest of the collection, which is available as a physical book and e-book (pdf) from Feral Angels Press here. Whatever the nature of your love, I hope you are able to celebrate it in the ways that mean the most to you, today and every day.

I have to share this piece every so often at the moment. Apologies if you’ve already seen it too many times. It’s one of the first pieces I wrote for MOLOK. I remember vividly, as it was the day after the poet and scholar Refaat Alareer was killed and I was hosting a Gig for Gaza in Totnes that evening, a fundraiser for the Hands Up Project and Medical Aid for Palestine. I’d just been told by one of the nervous organisers that it ‘would be good’ if I could avoid using the word ‘genocide’ in my hosting. I disagreed that it ‘would be good.’ I used the word, of course. This was December 2023. It feels like so long ago now.

The poem speaks for itself, I hope. I was shaking as I read it and spoke the words through tears. MOLOK is half-price at the moment. There’s some good poems in it, I believe.

HERE'S HOW WE LIE
Tom Hirons

There was never a child
And there was never a house:
It must be a trick of the light.
The olive trees grow
And the wild herbs wave;
Sweet in the evening, we lie.

There was never a father
And there was never a door
In the house that never stood there.
There was no praying or singing,
Or coffee to taste;
Sweet in the morning, we lie.

There was never a mother
And there was never a bed
And no one ever gave birth.
No one shed tears 
Or dreamed in their sleep;
Sweet in the night-time, we lie.

History’s a dream
And the dead are not ghosts.
There’s no injustice
Or bloody genocide.
There was never a land
And the bombs did not fall,
No slaughter and this is not hell.

Here’s how we lie:
Grass grows on the graves
And the ghosts gather round
To tell tales. 

Sweet in the evening,
Sweet in the morning,
And sweet in the night
Of our lies.

Buy MOLOK

I wrote Merrivale over a few years when we lived on the north moor, and it finally found a home in Falconer’s Joy in 2018. I remember working on it through various edits, until this is where it landed. I don’t know whether this is the best version, but I think it holds together better than the other ones, all-in-all. It’s most-honest sideways speech I've ever managed, thus far, I believe.

This new edition of Falconer’s Joy has a new layout and a foreword written by me in the depths of January, so it’s possible it doesn’t make any kind of linear sense at all. Good luck. In honour of the site on Dartmoor and what it does to me. And for everyone trying to remember and become the one they know they are.

MERRIVALE
A remembering, in seven parts



ONE

In the granite bed where I sleep,
There lies a bear whose breath is the rise
And fall of stars between these
Rough rows of stone.

The bear’s mouth is the October sky,
As hungry as a cave in the mountains,
As black as the water in a dream
In which you fell and died, then lived
To tell the tale, remade from your remains.

I place the only copy of my dog-eared life
Into the broken kist of the Great Bear’s mouth
And it leans out of the heaving night to
Eat the boy and man I’ve been,
Sleeps again with my dreams churning,
Hollow and restless in its ever-pregnant,
Ever-aching belly of the night. 

Hail, Merrivale, my bed of stone and stars.
Here, I’ll rest my memories and no other
Story will have a fast hold of me now.




TWO

Speak to me in the language of Moss and Stone:
The brook and fox-den know well my
Mother-tongue. Let us be clear: 

This Moor-language sings sweeter in my ear
Than all the songs I ever heard from angels,
Clear and beautiful as they were.
I tell you no lie, not here. I could not,
For all my skill in falsity.

This peat-brown water,
These rain-stacked stones;
Oaks both mighty and small.
That stream-crouched May
Beneath which I sleep so deeply
And forget and remember my most
Noble and ignoble truths.

Here are granite avenues; here is the sky above Earth;
The stone-wrought lines in which the ages live,
Not forgotten, by me, tonight at least. Not quite. 

This Bear has been stalking my life.
Sweet as a knife, warm as night,
Kind as a wounding and deadly as the hour
In which I dream my last great dream.
I bare my neck to the blades of
Remembering and forgetting.




THREE

Once or twice, when my spine was made of birch,
When the fire in my head was a fire in my belly,
I fell up into the sky of trees and there
Among the green leaves of oak and ash,
I found the runes and learned true speech. 

Because of this good fortune, I know my rightful name,
Though the fortune was not easily won and the road
Towards my name is a path of hunger and sorrow. 

But see, now, am I a bird or a song
Or a stone-bound dreamer?
Truly, I am a swallow in flight;
I am a dour man of England;
I am the river-stalker,
And I am both the blacksmith
And his chains. 

I cannot read the Galaxy,
But I know the language of tree,
Leaf and the cross-branched sky.
I know the speech of secrets;
I know the stone-lined path and
I have taken the long way home.

My brow-star is only just beginning to rise.
Attend to the voice in which I spoke truly:

Show me who you are when
The Great Bear has eaten
All your words.




FOUR

This, then, is the calling I ignored,
The enemy with whom I would not engage. 

This is the place I remembered,
But to which I would not return.
Prodigal and penitent, I pray truly:
Hold me tight and close enough
That memory returns and stays
Right in my remembering.

My seven sisters wait, wiser
Than my brothers in star-Lore,
But not that of stream or tree
Or of the grey stones, now as
Fixed in my geography as a coast
Or a birthplace or a grave. 
I was at the battle where the great shout was made;
I advised the army in that significant moment:
Help me recollect precisely
The weapons we employed then and
The banners to which we rallied.

How did we find hope enough
To take to the field
Though our enemies were myriad
And impervious to all our arms?
How did we face the dark
And our certain death and yet,
Somehow, prevail?

Hail, Merrivale, where I fought and
Fell that day and lived again.
Time, tide nor all the flooding sea
Will keep me from you now.




FIVE

Young as I was in those giddy days,
I believed the fable of unending flight,
Fleet-footed, bright-winged,
Agile as a sprite or a swift,
Weightlessly becoming God.

I wrought havoc in the shadow
Of my hawk-shaped flight,
Became not light, but a bearer
Of insubstantial promises and the folly
Of those who lose the Earth
And forget the shape of their own
Feet in the darkness. 

In lesser days than the great hours,
I writhed in the ties of this life,
As stubborn as a fly or a bolt stuck fast,
As graceless as a faltering foot.

When gravity claimed me,
I made a slower, sadder story:
An agent of the light-flecked,
Dark-cracked jackdaw.
A dappled servant of complexity,
One foot in the bright-shining heaven,
One foot in the King’s stone of Dùn Ad,
No longer golden, but dark as
Silver in the ashes of the forge.

The Bear made a feast of all those I wronged,
All those I loved and all who stood by.
Each one in their time has trodden
That pathway of stone and stars.

Was I closer to God and love through
My mistakes or through my triumphs?
Who’s to say? Not I, and the Bear
Is silent and no one else can know.

A hawk cries out in the dark hour,
Hungry and homeless as a saint.
The water in the thin leat sings
Its song of endless, hopeless hope.

The Bear splays its crooked claws and
Reaches out into the dense-tongued darkness
To deliver all our victories against deception.




SIX

It was a dark day, that Easter
And our child, unborn, our first.

We sat in your shadow,
Adrift in our distress.
We climbed King’s Tor,
Knew the world was good,
Though we could not feel it.
Aged with grief,
Cut out of innocence,
We were bereft.
I don’t know another place
That could have held us. 

Hail, Merrivale.
This time, I will not forget.




SEVEN

Three horses,
A skewbald foal as fresh as dawn.
A score or so of sheep
Bleating in the hill-dew.
A wagtail on a finger of rock.
An immense Bear, asleep,
Stretching its arms in the stars.
 
The high moor is calling;
They have uncovered the queen
With the knotted hair,
And the king is sleeping
In the black-bird’s eye.
Now is not the time for silence. 

The chill wind cuts.
The hard ground bites;
The mist becomes rain and I,
A mortal man with
Aching legs and heavy arms,
Awaken to the thin daybreak light. 

I will learn to speak with the bear’s tongue;
I will tell my story from the stone-mouth of the kistvaen;
I will learn again to walk the long way home.

I rise and step towards my life,
Daring in this damp dawn to trust
That not all things worth loving are lost.
Another star is rising on the pale horizon
And the moon has yet to sing.

Hail, Merrivale;
I remember;
I believe;
I begin.

You can find the poem here on my website, and the new e-book of Falconer’s Joy here on the Feral Angels Press website.

Thanks, as ever, for being interested. If you’d like to support me, there’s currently a sale on until February 10th in the shop — all my printed work is half-price. You can find that here.

Other ways to support my work include joining the new, improved Bear Mountain community via ko-fi here, with a monthly subscription from £1 upwards, through which you’ll get access to the Bear Mountain Discord group.

Also, just share the work around if you like it. Thanks so much!

I posted this short slab of writing just now on the feeds, so thought I’d share it here, too. Writing for the attention-impoverished worlds of social media is a strange exercise, but sometimes has some good power in trying to stay focused, to put language down in short and compelling ways, even when it’s not poetry. I’m not sure, of course, that I managed here, but it sums up a little of what I’m feeling. Twenty years in Scotland left me with a relationship with Winter, Spring and Imbolc that’s very different from my experience down here in Devon, but something of the same force still goes on. Imbolc’s one of my very favourite seasonal festivals.

Imbolc. The glimmering of light; a glimpse in the dark of something to sustain us through Winter, for all that it’s far from over. The kindling in the heart that keeps us from despair – or wanhope, as the word once was, the waned emptiness of hope.

We persist, with the candle-flame of life still burning. Winter in southwest England is nothing too arduous, on the whole, but still, we live in the mud and the gloom and the endless bloody rain. And the world… We persist; we gather strength; we wait for emergence and a fresh sword, for laughter. We reach for what sustains us through the dark of the year.

For me, poetry is an essential nutrient, and especially in Winter. When I forget to read (and listen to) poetry, my thinking goes awry and becomes too linear. Poetry reminds us in the flickering half-light not only what’s important, but how to think in ways beyond the transactional forms of modernity. Our minds grow, our souls ignite; we become suffused with another way of being.

Rest may not be possible as we labour in the mills of Capitalism and on the literal or metaphorical streets for our brothers and sisters and our children and our communities, but let’s nourish ourselves as best we can, so that when Spring comes – as it will – our souls are not too wan to find fresh ways to resist the horrors, and to celebrate the gift of life.

Hang in there.

I remain ambivalent about Substack, and am changing my relationship with all these spaces. Before Christmas, I unfollowed thousands of accounts on Instagram. I need more time to write, and more socialising in Real World spaces!

Mostly, I want to be curled up asleep in a cave until late February, to be honest. Sadly, the world keeps poking me. 2026 feels old already, but I made it to the woods yesterday morning before spending some beautiful time with for her podcast and remembered a little of how to be properly human, for a while at least. And on Wednesday, I taught two classes - one for ’s wonderful Grief Magic course online, and one in-person café in Buckfastleigh. So very different, and both with some significant wonder in them.

Sending love and solidarity to all of you making rafts.

(And if you’re interested, there’s a Feral Angels’ Poetry Café online tomorrow - sliding scale, all welcome - details here!)

Here’s a new piece as we swing on the hinges of the year. I recorded this one the last time I was out at my favourite place on Dartmoor, having just been in the stream. It needs a little more work, but I like it.

I wish you a moment or two of cold-water sanity as we gird ourselves for 2026 and its unknown face. Also, don't get a cold-water heart-attack.

Thanks for being interested in my writing, wherever you’ve arrived from. I’m hoping 2026 will see some more non-fiction coming out, and — I sincerely pray — the completion of that long-overdue novel about the boy and the falcon’s eye…

Bathing in the stream in Winter

A man walks out onto the grey moor.
The winter wind cuts into his eyes.
He goes to a pool in a hidden stream,
a place he knows well and to which
he’s been many times before today.
He’s measured the weight of his spirit
against it for decades now and –
though the wind is fierce in his face –
he leaves his clothes on the bank
and heaves his thick body into the stream
immersing himself in its holy
freezing water.

And for perhaps one minute after that
shattering, sometimes terrifying immersion
his spirit is weightless, and he is rendered sane
and remembers all that he needs to know.

By the time he has put his clothes back on,
he has already lost his sanity.
By the time he reaches the gate to the road,
he is buoyed only by the memory of how it felt
in those glorious seconds of stream-born sense
and the knowledge of the clear, cutting water;
the way his blood sang and his spirit soared,
lifting for those few moments of clarity
towards the bright field of wonder before gravity
and the grey madnesses of modernity
took him under once again.

If you’d like to read (and hear) more of my work, you can always head over to www.tomhirons.com (where a lot of my work is up for free) or to feralangels.com (where you can buy my books, posters, e-books and audiobooks on a sliding scale.)

Two things for you, though.

One, a piece from The Queen of Heaven. The other, something I post every solstice, as a recognition of those who don’t have time, space or energy to do ‘Sacred Solstice Things.’

I hope one or the other speaks to you, or maybe even both.

I wish you unexpected grace here at the sun-hinge moment and that you and your loved ones are well and safe, and that they know they’re loved.

I’m hardly here in the internet of (para)social spaces, and when I am, I’m mostly lurking, like some weirdo wizard with a seeing stone. But, I’m working on new writing - poems, fiction, some essays. I’m dreaming of collaborations with musicians. Something deep is moving. I remember home in my bones, clearer and clearer. And I miss it more keenly every day.

* ‘need’ - I’m not really sure how much is need and how much is an illusion of need. This is a world of smoke and mirrors.

But, while I’m here… Some things need to be said and said again.
This is from MOLOK.

Thanks, as ever, for being interested in the language-wrangling I do!

I think it’s one of my best poems, actually.

In other news, I’m not 100% sure about Substack. For me, that is. It seems to work well for other people. I’m planning on putting my efforts into producing some nice monograph/pamphlets next year and scrawling on walls. Death to the machine!

Buy MOLOK

DID YOU KNOW that I offer poetry mentoring, both online and in-person?

Whether it’s help with editing work (individual pieces or whole collections), or uncovering what it is you really want to say, or working with blocked creativity, I’m here.

You can book a 20 minute no-obligation call to find out if working with me (one-off or in an ongoing way) is a good fit.

I’m really pretty good and I love the work.
Take a leap and book a call.
I also mentor storytellers…

Book a no-obligation call

The photo is adapted from one by when he and were visiting this summer, during a drizzly visit to Wistman’s Wood - thanks Niels!

On Friday, we launched MOLOK at the Moor Imagination Collective in Buckfastleigh

Thanks for coming along, or for being on the livestream.

It was a good thing, and we recorded it.

Here's a snippet - you can find the rest of it for free here on youtube:

MOLOK launch video