by R. S. Thomas
people must come to and stare at and pass by?
The Presence
I pray and incur
silence. Some take that silence
for refusal.
I feel the power
that, invisible, catches me
by the sleeve, nudging
towards the long shelf
that has the book on it I will take down
and read and find the antidote
to an ailment.
I know its ways with me;
how it enters my life,
is present rather
before I perceive it, sunlight quivering
on a bare wall.
Is it consciousness trying
to get through?
Am I under
regard?
It takes me seconds
to focus, by which time
it has shifted its gaze,
looking a little to one
side, as though I were not here.
It has the universe
to be abroad in.
There is nothing I can do
but fill myself with my own
silence, hoping it will approach
like a wild creature to drink
there, or perhaps like Narcissus
to linger a moment over its transparent face.
Forest Dwellers
Men who have hardly uncurled
from their posture in the
womb. Naked. Heads bowed, not
in prayer, but in contemplation
of the earth they came from,
that suckled them on the brown
milk that builds bone not brain.
Who called them forth to walk
in the green light, their thoughts
on darkness? Their women,
who are not Madonnas, have babes
at the breast with the wise,
time-ridden faces of the Christ
child in a painting by a Florentine
master. The warriors prepare poison
with love’s care for the Sebastians
of their arrows. They have no
God, but follow the contradictions
of a ritual that says
life must die that life
may go on. They wear flowers in their hair.
Return
Taking the next train
to the city, yet always returning
to his place on a bridge
over a river, throbbing
with trout, whose widening
circles are the mandala
for contentment. So will a poet
return to the work laid
on one side and abandoned
for the voices summoning him
to the wrong tasks. Art
is not life. It is not the river
carrying us away, but the motionless
image of itself on a fast-
running surface with which life
tries constantly to keep up.
Salt
The centuries were without
his like; then suddenly
he was there, fishing
in a hurrying river,
the Teifi. But what he caught
were ideas; the water
described a direction;
his thoughts were toy boats
that grew big; one
he embarked on: Suez,
the Far East – the atlas
became familiar
to him as a back-yard.
‘Spittle and phlegm!
Listen, sailor,
to the wind piping
in the thin rigging;
go climbing there
to the empty nest
of the black crow. Far
is the deck and farther
your courage.’
‘Captain,
captain, long
is the wind’s tongue
and cold your porridge.
Look up now
and dry your beard;
teach me to ride
in my high saddle
the mare of the sea.’
He fell.
Was it the fall
of the soul
from favour? Past four
decks, and his bones
splintered. Seventeen weeks
on his back. No Welsh,
no English; but the hands
of the Romanians
kind. He became
their mouth-piece, publishing
his rebirth. In a new
body he sailed
away on his old course.
On brisk evenings
before the Trades
the sails named
themselves; he repeated
the lesson. The First
Mate had a hard boot.
Cassiopeia, Sirius,
all the stars
over him, yet none of them
with a Welsh sound.
But the capstan spoke
in cynghanedd; from
breaker to breaker
he neared home.
‘Evening, sailor.’ Red
lips and a tilted smile:
the ports garlanded
with faces. Was he aware
of a vicarage garden
that was the cramped harbour
he came to?
Later
the letters began: ‘Dear –’
the small pen
in the stubbed hand –
‘in these dark waters
the memory of you
is like a –’ words scratched
out that would win a smile
from the reader. The deep
sea and the old call
to abandon it
for the narrow channel
from her and back. The chair
was waiting and the slippers
by the soft fire
that would destroy him.
‘The hard love I had at her small breasts;
the tight fists that pummelled me;
the thin mouth with its teeth clenched
on a memory.’ Are all women
like this? He said so, that man,
my father, who had tasted their lips’
vinegar, coughing it up
in harbours he returned to with his tongue
lolling from droughts of the sea.
The voice of my father
in the night with the hunger
of the sea in it and the emptiness
of the sea. While the house founders
in time, I must listen to him
complaining, a ship’s captain
with no crew, a navigator
without a port: rejected
by the barrenness of his wife’s
coasts, by the wind’s bitterness
off her heart. I take his failure
for ensign, flying it
at my bedpost, where my own
children cry to be born.
Suddenly he was old
in a silence unhaunted
by the wailing signals;
and was put ashore
on that four-walled
island to which all sailors must come.
So he went gleaning
in the flickering stubble,
where formerly his keel reaped.
And the remembered stars
swarmed for him; and the birds, too,
most of them with wrong names.
Always he looked aft
from the chair’s bridge, and his hearers
suffered the anachronism of his view.
The form of his
life; the weak smile;
the fingers filed down
by canvas; the hopes
blunted: the lack of understanding
of life creasing the brow
with wrinkles, as though he pondered
on deep things.
Out of touch
with the times, landlocked
in
his ears’ calm, he remembered
and talked; spoiling himself
with his mirth; running the joke
down; giving his orders
again in hospital with his crew
gone. What was a sailor
good for who had sailed
all seas and learned wisdom
from none, fetched up there
in the shallows with his mind’s
valueless cargo?
Strange grace, sailor, docked now
in six feet of thick soil,
with the light dribbling on you
from the lamps in a street
of a town you had no love
for. The place is a harbour
for stone sails, and under
it you lie with the becalmed
fleet heavy upon you. This
was never the destination
you dreamed of in that other
churchyard by Teifi.
And I,
can I accept your voyages
are done; that there is no tide
high enough to float you off
this mean shoal of plastic
and trash? Six feet down,
and the bone’s anchor too
heavy for your child spirit
to haul on and be up and away?
Plas Difancoll
1
Trees, of course, silent attendants,
though no more silent than footmen
at the great table, ministering shadows
waiting only to be ignored.
Leaves of glass, full of the year’s
wine, broken repeatedly and
as repeatedly replaced.
A garden ventilated by cool
fountains. Two huge lions
of stone, rampant at the drive
gates, intimidating no one
but those lately arrived
and wondering whether they are too early.
Between hillsides the large house,
classical and out of place
in the landscape, as Welsh as
it is unpronounceable. He
and she, magnificent both, not least
in the confidence of their ignorance
of the insubordination of the future.
2
Down to two servants now and those
grown cheeky; unvisited any more
by the county. The rust of autumn
outside on the landscape and inside in the joints
of these hangers-on. Time running out
for them here in the broken hour-glass
that they live in with its cracked
windows mirroring a consumptive moon.
The fish starve in their waters or
are pilfered from them by the unpunished
trespassers
from away. The place leans on itself,
sags. There is a conspiracy of the ivy
to bring it down, with no prayers
going up from the meeting-house for its salvation.
3
The owls’ home and the starlings’,
with moss bandaging its deep wounds
to no purpose, for the wind festers in
them and the light diagnoses
impartially the hopelessness
of its condition. Colonialism
is a lost cause. Yet the Welsh
are here, picknicking among the ruins
on their Corona and potato
crisps, speaking their language without pride,
but with no backward look over the shoulder.
Perspectives
Primeval
Beasts rearing from green slime –
an illiterate country, unable to read
its own name. Stones moved into position
on the hills’ sides; snakes laid their eggs
in their cold shadow. The earth suffered
the sky’s shrapnel, bled yellow
into the enraged sea. At night heavily
over the heaving forests the moon
sagged. The ancestors of the tigers
brightened their claws. Such sounds
as there were came from the strong
torn by the stronger. The dawn tilted
an unpolished mirror for the runt mind
to look at itself in without recognition.
Neolithic
I shall not be here,
and the way things are going
now won’t want to be.
Wheels go no faster
than what pulls them. That land
visible over the sea
in clear weather, they say
we will get there some time
soon and take possession
of it. What then? More acres
to cultivate and no markets
for the crops.
The young
are not what they were,
smirking at the auspices
of the entrails. Some think
there will be a revival.
I don’t believe it. This
plucked music has come
to stay. The natural breathing
of the pipes was to
a different god. Imagine
depending on the intestines
of a polecat for accompaniment
to one’s worship! I have
attended at the sacrifice
of the language that is the liturgy
the priests like, and felt
the draught that was God
leaving. I think some day
there will be nothing left
but to go back to the place
I came from and wrap
myself in the memory
of how I was young
once and under the covenant
of that God not given to folly.
Christian
They were bearded
like the sea they came
from; rang stone bells
for their stone hearers.
Their cells fitted them
like a coffin.
Out of them their prayers
seeped, delicate
flowers where weeds
grew. Their dry bread
broke like a bone.
Wine in the cup
was a blood-stained mirror
for sinners to look
into with one eye
closed, and see themselves forgiven.
Mediaeval
I was my lord’s bard,
telling again sweetly
what had been done bloodily.
We lived in a valley;
he had no lady.
Fame was our horizon.
In the spring of the year
the wind brought the news
of a woman’s beauty.
Her eyes were still stones
in her smooth-running hair.
Her voice was the birds’ envy.
We made a brave foray;
the engagement was furious.
We came back alone.
Sing me, my lord said,
the things nearer home:
my falcons, my horse.
I did so, he listened.
My harp was of fire;
the notes bounced like sparks
off his spirit’s anvil.
Tomorrow, he promised,
we will ride forth again.
Modern
And the brittle gardens
of Dinorwig, deep
in the fallen petals of
their slate flowers: such the autumn
of a people! Whose spring
is it sleeps in a glass
bulb, ready to astonish us
with its brilliance? Bring
on the dancing girls
of the future, the swaying
pylons with their metal
hair bickering towards England.
Covenanters
Jesus
He wore no hat, but he produced, say
fro
m up his sleeve, an answer
to their question about
the next life. It is here,
he said, tapping his forehead
as one would to indicate
an idiot. The crowd frowned
and took up stones
to punish his adultery
with the truth. But he, stooping
to write on the ground, looked
sideways at them, as they withdrew
each to the glass-house of his own mind.
Mary
Model of models;
virgin smile over
the ageless babe,
my portrait is in
the world’s galleries:
motherhood without
a husband; chastity
my complexion. Cradle
of flesh for one
not born of the flesh.
Alas, you painters
of a half-truth, the
poets excel you.
They looked in under
my lids and saw
as through a stained glass
window the hill
the infant must climb,
the crookedness of
the kiss he appended
to his loving epistle.
Joseph
I knew what I knew.
She denied it.
I went with her
on the long journey.
My seed was my own
seed, was the star
that the wise men
followed. Their gifts were no good
to us. I taught him
the true trade: to go
with the grain.
He left me
for a new master
who put him to the fashioning
of a cross for himself.
Lazarus
That imperious summons ! Spring’s
restlessness among dry
leaves. He stands at the grave’s
entrance and rubs death from his eyes,
while thought’s fountain recommences
its play, watering the waste ground
over again for the germination
of the blood’s seed, where roses should blow.
Judas Iscariot
picked flowers stole birds’ eggs
like the rest was his mother’s
fondling passed under the tree
he would hang from without
realising looked through the branches
saw only the cloud face
of God and the sky mirroring
the water he was brought up by
was a shrewd youth with a talent
for sums became treasurer
to the disciples was genuinely
hurt by a certain extravagance
in the Master went out of his own
free will to do that which he had to do.
Paul
Wrong question, Paul. Who am I,
Lord? is what you should have asked.
And the answer, surely, somebody
who it is easy for us to kick against.
There were some matters you were dead right
about. For instance, I like you
on love. But marriage – I would have thought