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Collected Poems 1945-1990

Page 15

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.

 

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