by R. S. Thomas
of shadow. Your problems
are in their past;
those they are about to solve
are what you are incapable
of conceiving. In experiments
in outbreeding, under the growing microscope
of the mind, they are isolating
the human virus and burning it
up in the fierceness of their detachment.
Amen
It was all arranged:
the virgin with child, the birth
in Bethlehem, the arid journey uphill
to Jerusalem. The prophets foretold
it, the scriptures conditioned him
to accept it. Judas went to his work
with his sour kiss; what else
could he do?
A wise old age,
the honours awarded for lasting,
are not for a saviour. He had
to be killed; salvation acquired
by an increased guilt. The tree,
with its roots in the mind’s dark,
was divinely planted, the original fork
in existence. There is no meaning in life,
unless men can be found to reject
love. God needs his martyrdom.
The mild eyes stare from the Cross
in perverse triumph. What does he care
that the people’s offerings are so small?
God’s Story
A thousand years went by.
The Buddha sat under the Bo tree
rhyming. God burned in the sky
as of old. The family waited
for him who would not come back
any more. Who is my father
and mother? God fingered the hole
in his side, where the green tree
came from. The desert gave up
its saints. The Pope’s ring was deadly
as a snake’s kiss. Art and poetry
drank of that slow poison. God,
looking into a dry chalice,
felt the cold touch of the machine
on his hand, leading him
to a steel altar. ‘Where are you?’
he called, seeking himself among
the dumb cogs and tireless camshafts.
Relay
I switch on, tune in –
the marvellous languages
of the peoples of the planet,
discussing the weather! Thousands of years
speech was evolving – that line of trees
on the hill slope has the illusion
of movement. I think of man
on his mountain; he has paused
now for lack of the oxygen
of the spirit; the easier options
surround him, the complacencies of being
half-way up. He needs some breath
from the summit, a stench rising
to him from the valley from
which he has toiled to release
his potential; a memory rather
of those bright flags, that other
climbers of other mountains
have planted and gone
their way, not down but on
up the incline of their choosing.
The Prayer
He kneeled down
dismissing his orisons
as inappropriate; one by one
they came to his lips and were swallowed
but without bile.
He fell back
on an old prayer: Teach me to know
what to pray for. He
listened; after the weather of
his asking, no still, small
voice, only the parade
of ghosts, casualties
of his past intercessions. He
held out his hands, cupped
as though to receive blood, leaking
from life’s side. They
remained dry, as his mouth
did. But the prayer formed:
Deliver me from the long drought
of the mind. Let leaves
from the deciduous Cross
fall on us, washing
us clean, turning our autumn
to gold by the affluence of their fountain.
The Tool
So there was nothing?
Nothing. An echo?
Who spoke? There was emptiness
and a face staring, seeking
a likeness. There was thought
probing an absence. God
knew he was naked and
withdrew himself. And the germs
swarmed, their alphabet
lengthened; where was the tongue
to pronounce it? Pain, said
the voice, and the creature
stood up, its mind folded
on darkness. It put out a hand,
as though to implore
wisdom, and a tool
gleamed there. The alternatives
of the tree sharpened. God
spoke to him out of the tree’s
wholeness, but the sound
of the tool drowned him. He came forth
in his nakedness. ‘Forgive me,’
he said, suffering the tool’s
insolence in his own body.
Poste Restante
I want you to know how it was,
whether the Cross grinds into dust
under men’s wheels or shines brightly
as a monument to a new era.
There was a church and one man
served it, and few worshipped
there in the raw light on the hill
in winter, moving among the stones
fallen about them like the ruins
of a culture they were too weak
to replace, too poor themselves
to do anything but wait
for the ending of a life
they had not asked for.
The priest would come
and pull on the hoarse bell nobody
heard, and enter that place
of darkness, sour with the mould
of the years. And the spider would run
from the chalice, and the wine lie
there for a time, cold and unwanted
by all but he, while the candles
guttered as the wind picked
at the roof. And he would see
over that bare meal his face
staring at him from the cracked glass
of the window, with the lips moving
like those of an inhabitant of
a world beyond this.
And so back
to the damp vestry to the book
where he would scratch his name and the date
he could hardly remember, Sunday
by Sunday, while the place sank
to its knees and the earth turned
from season to season like the wheel
of a great foundry to produce
you, friend, who will know what happened.
Woman Combing
Degas
So the hair, too,
can be played?
She lets it down
and combs a sonata
from it: brown cello
of hair, with the arm
bowing. Painter,
who with your quick
brush, gave us this silent
music, there is nothing
that you left out.
The blues and greens,
the abandoned snowfall
of her shift, the light
on her soft flesh tell us
from what score she performs.
The Son
It was your mother wanted you;
you were already half-formed
when I entered. But can I deny
the hunger, the loneliness bringing me in
from myself? And when you appeared
before me, there was no repentance
for what I had done, as there was shame
in the doin
g it; compassion only
for that which was too small to be called
human. The unfolding of your hands
was plant-like, your ear was the shell
I thundered in; your cries, when they came,
were those of a blind creature
trodden upon; pain not yet become grief.
Mediations
And to one God says: Come
to me by numbers and
figures; see my beauty
in the angles between
stars, in the equations
of my kingdom. Bring
your lenses to the worship
of my dimensions: far
out and far in, there
is always more of me
in proportion. And to another:
I am the bush burning
at the centre of
your existence; you must put
your knowledge off and come
to me with your mind
bare. And to this one
he says: Because of
your high stomach, the bleakness
of your emotions, I
will come to you in the simplest
things, in the body
of a man hung on a tall
tree you have converted to
timber and you shall not know me.
The Chapel
A little aside from the main road,
becalmed in a last-century greyness,
there is the chapel, ugly, without the appeal
to the tourist to stop his car
and visit it. The traffic goes by,
and the river goes by, and quick shadows
of clouds, too, and the chapel settles
a little deeper into the grass.
But here once on an evening like this,
in the darkness that was about
his hearers, a preacher caught fire
and burned steadily before them
with a strange light, so that they saw
the splendour of the barren mountains
about them and sang their amens
fiercely, narrow but saved
in a way that men are not now.
The Casualty
I had forgotten
the old quest for truth
I was here for. Other cares
held me: urgencies
of the body; a girl
beckoned; money
had never appeared
so ethereal; it was God’s blood
circulating in the veins
of creation; I partook
of it like Communion, lost
myself on my way
home, with the varying voices
on call. Moving backward
into a receding
future, I lost the use
of perspective, borrowing poetry
to buy my children
their prose. The past was a poor
king, rendering his crown down
for the historian. Every day
I went on with that
metallic warfare in which
the one casualty is love.
The Problem
There was this problem.
The mind contemplated it;
the body amused itself
in the sun. Put it by, put it by,
the wind whispered. The mind
dozed. Seven empires went under
the blown sand. A people stood up
in Athens; the problem recognised
them, but was not to be outstared
by their blind sculpture. Son of God
or Son of Man? At Jerusalem
the problem was given a new shape.
The Cross offered its gaunt solution
to the Gentiles; under its shadow
their bones whitened. The philosophers christened
their premise. The problem reposed
over the cellars of the alchemists.
Probing
No one would know you had lived,
but for my discovery
of the anonymous undulation
of your grave, like the early swelling
of the belly of a woman
who is with child. And if I entered
it now, I would find your bones
huddled together, but without
flesh, their ruined architecture
a reproach, the skull luminous
but not with thought.
Would it help us to learn
what you were called in your forgotten
language? Are not our jaws
frail for the sustaining of the consonants’
weight? Yet they were balanced
on tongues like ours, echoed
in the ears’ passages, in intervals when
the volcano was silent. How
tenderly did the woman handle
them, as she leaned her haired body
to yours? Where are the instruments
of your music, the pipe of hazel, the
bull’s horn, the interpreters
of your loneliness on this
ferocious planet?
We are domesticating
it slowly; but at times it rises
against us, so that we see again
the primeval shadows you built
your fire amongst. We are cleverer
than you; our nightmares
are intellectual. But we never awaken
from the compulsiveness of the mind’s
stare into the lenses’ furious interiors.
The Flower
I asked for riches.
You gave me the earth, the sea,
the immensity
of the broad sky. I looked at them
and learned I must withdraw
to possess them. I gave my eyes
and my ears, and dwelt
in a soundless darkness
in the shadow
of your regard.
The soul
grew in me, filling me
with its fragrance.
Men came
to me from the four
winds to hear me speak
of the unseen flower by which
I sat, whose roots were not
in the soil, nor its petals the colour
of the wide sea; that was
its own species with its own
sky over it, shot
with the rainbow of your coming and going.
Ann Griffith
So God spoke to her,
she the poor girl from the village
without learning. ‘Play me,’
he said, ‘on the white keys
of your body. I have seen you dance
for the bridegrooms that were not
to be, while I waited for you
under the ripening boughs of
the myrtle. These people know me
only in the thin hymns of
the mind, in the arid sermons
and prayers. I am the live God,
nailed fast to the old tree
of a nation by its unreal
tears. I thirst, I thirst
for the spring water. Draw it up
for me from your heart’s well and I will change
it to wine upon your unkissed lips.
The Moon in Lleyn
The last quarter of the moon
of Jesus gives way
to the dark; the serpent
digests the egg. Here
on my knees in this stone
church, that is full only
of the silent congregation
of shadows and the sea’s
sound, it is easy to believe
Yeats was right. Just as though
choirs had not sung, shells
have swallowed them; the tide laps
at the Bible; the bell fetches
no people to the brittle miracle
of the bread. The sand is waiting
for the running back of the grains
> in the wall into its blond
glass. Religion is over, and
what will emerge from the body
of the new moon, no one
can say.
But a voice sounds
in my ear: Why so fast,
mortal? These very seas
are baptised. The parish
has a saint’s name time cannot
unfrock. In cities that
have outgrown their promise people
are becoming pilgrims
again, if not to this place,
then to the recreation of it
in their own spirits. You must remain
kneeling. Even as this moon
making its way through the earth’s
cumbersome shadow, prayer, too,
has its phases.
Suddenly
As I had always known
he would come, unannounced,
remarkable merely for the absence
of clamour. So truth must appear
to the thinker; so, at a stage
of the experiment, the answer
must quietly emerge. I looked
at him, not with the eye
only, but with the whole
of my being, overflowing with
him as a chalice would
with the sea. Yet was he
no more there than before,
his area occupied
by the unhaloed presences.
You could put your hand
in him without consciousness
of his wounds. The gamblers
at the foot of the unnoticed
cross went on with
their dicing; yet the invisible
garment for which they played
was no longer at stake, but worn
by him in this risen existence.
Taste
I had preferred Chaucer
but for the slop in his saucer;
or grave Edmund Spenser
moving formally as a dancer.
But Shakespeare’s cut and thrust,
I allow you, was a must
on my bookshelves; and after,
Donne’s thin, cerebral laughter.
Dryden I could not abide,
nor the mincing fratricide
of Pope. Jonathan Swift,
though courageous, had no uplift.
But Wordsworth, looking in the lake
of his mind, him I could take;
and Percy Shelley at times;
Byron, too, but only for his rhymes.
Tennyson? Browning? If I mention
them, it is but from convention,
despite the vowel technique
of the one, the other’s moral cheek.