by R. S. Thomas
Where did he come from?
Pupating against the time
he was needed, he emerged
with wings furled, unrecognised
by the pundits; has spread
them now elegantly
to dazzle, curtains drawn
with a new nonchalance
between barbarism and ourselves.
Patron without condescension
of the art, he teaches flight’s
true purpose, which is,
sensitive but not too blinded
by some inner radiance, to be
in delicatest orbit about it.
The Unvanquished
And courage shall give way
to despair and despair
to suffering, and suffering
shall end in death. But you
who are not free to choose
what you suffer can choose
your response. Farmers I
knew, born to the ills
of their kind, scrubbed bare
by the weather, suffocating
with phlegm; all their means gone
to buy their consumptive son
the profession his body
could not sustain. Proudly
they lived, watching the spirit,
diamond-faceted, crumble
to the small, hard, round, dry
stone that humanity
chokes on. When they died, it
was bravely, close up under the rain-hammered
rafters, never complaining.
Vocabulary
Ruminations, illuminations!
Vocabulary, sing for me
in your cage of time,
restless on the bone’s perch.
You are dust; then a bird
with new feathers, but always
beating at the mind’s bars.
A new Noah, I despatch
you to alight awhile
on steel branches; then call
you home, looking for the metallic
gleam of a new poem in your bill.
Obstetrics
The sea’s skin is smooth.
A part-time surgeon
I make my incision,
and there are born to me
out of its grieved side
cold, glittering bodies
of fishes, the scaled babes
of the sea.
They lie choking
in air, their eyes focused
on nothing, silently beseeching
with huge, rounded vowels
to be put back.
There
are plenty more of you,
I think in self-exculpation.
Because of your absence
of mind, your flesh must become
my flesh and parade
under the stars, meditating
upon love with only a memory
of the under-water grottoes.
In Memoriam E. E. T.
Young I offered an old man
friendship. It was not refused.
Leaning from the swaying ladder
up which he had climbed he threw
those few books down that were to be
a memorial of him, when he had withdrawn
into his cloud. I have spent years
winnowing their pages, separating
their philosophy from how he appeared:
the lidless skull; the small hands’ mockery
of his ambition in the last war to drive
armoured cars; his angling for connivance
at the helplessness of his merriment
at his own jokes.
I remember him irrigating
with his German the dried-up consciences
of prisoners; his indulgence
of himself at the piano at Christmas
at lieder’s expense. His tales were of duels
among students in the courtyard
of a Leipzig beer-garden; of Harnack
and the mind’s reach; of how Lawrence
would answer his critics with ever
a more splendid book.
I think he has gone
now, looking for the last laugh in Nirvana
or the tearless reflection of it in blond eyes.
Gallery
The stillness of paintings!
Move stealthily so
as not to disturb.
They are not asleep.
They keep watch on
our taste. It is not they
are being looked at
but we by faces
which over the centuries
keep their repose. Such eyes
they have as steadily,
while crowds come and
crowds go, burn on
with art’s crocus flame
in their enamelled sockets.
Destinations
Travelling towards the light
we were waylaid by darkness;
a formless company detained us,
saying everything, meaning nothing.
It is a conspiracy, I said,
of great age, in revolt
against reason, against all
that would be ethereal in us.
We looked at one another.
Was it the silence of agreement,
or the vacuum between two minds
not in contact? There is an ingredient
in thought that is its own
hindrance. Had we come all that way
to detect it? The voices combined,
urging us to put our trust
in the bone’s wisdom. Remember,
they charged us, the future
for which you are bound is where
you began. Was there a counter
command? I listened as to
a tideless sea on a remote
star, and knew our direction
was elsewhere; to the light, yes,
but not such as minerals
deploy; to the brightness over
an interior horizon, which is science
transfiguring itself in love’s mirror.
The Other
There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl calling
far off and a fox barking
miles away. It is then that I lie
in the lean hours awake listening
to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic
rising and falling, rising and falling
wave on wave on the long shore
by the village, that is without light
and companionless. And the thought comes
of that other being who is awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.
The Conviction
There was a face in chapel
with hands folded
over it as though in prayer,
but peering between
fingers at the congregation
to see if it was to the minister
they listened or to itself.
In the intervals in the sermon
there was the insect whispering
of that other commentator
on life, a kind of:
No, no, no, to the affirmatives
of its rival. It was why
they went. If the preacher
was immortal, his homily
was not. There was a moment
towards which it crept
to die at the precise stroke
of the bell. The listeners
rose to their feet and went home
one by one, heretics still
in their conviction that time was God.
He and She
When he came in, she was there.
When she looked at him,
he smiled. There were lights
in time’s wave breaking
on an eternal shore.
&nbs
p; Seated at table –
no need for the fracture
of the room’s silence; noiselessly
they conversed. Thoughts mingling
were lit up, gold
particles in the mind’s stream.
Were there currents between them?
Why, when he thought darkly,
would the nerves play
at her lips’ brim? What was the heart’s depth?
There were fathoms in her,
too, and sometimes he crossed
them and landed and was not repulsed.
Sara Rhiw
So we know
she must have said something
to him – What language,
life? Ah, what language?
Thousands of years later
I inhabit a house
whose stone is the language
of its builders. Here
by the sea they said little.
But their message to the future
was: Build well. In the fire
of an evening I catch faces
staring at me. In April,
when light quickens and clouds
thin, boneless presences
flit through my room.
Will they inherit me
one day? What certainties
have I to hand on
like the punctuality
with which, at the moon’s
rising, the bay breaks
into a smile, as though meaning
were not the difficulty at all?
Mother and Child
No clouds overhead;
no troubles freckling
the maid’s eye. The shadows
are immediate and are thrown
by upholstered branches,
not by that angled
event that from beyond
the horizon puts its roots
down. This is Eden
over again. The child
holds out both his hands
for the breast’s apple. The snake is asleep.
Siân
Can one make love
to a kitten? Siân,
purr for me; jump
into my lap; knead
me. Shine your claws
in my smile. Your talk is a bell
fastened with ribbon
about your throat. My hand
thrills to the electricity
of your fur. So small
you are, I cradle
you on my arm, wearing
you at my breast-bone. Tune
your pulses to mine.
I know the slits in your eyes
are not to be peeped
through; evidence rather
that you can find your way
through the thick of the darkness
that all too often manages
to invest my heart.
West Coast
Here are men
who live at the edges
of vast space.
Light pours on them
and they lift their faces
to be washed by it
like children. And their minds
are the minds of children,
shallow pools that the days
look into, as they
pass in the endless procession
that goes nowhere.
They are
spendthrifts of time, yet
always there is more of it
than they need for the tongue’s clambering
up their one story.
Out in the fields,
against skies that are all
blood, they erect the scarecrow
of their kind, the crossed bones
with the flesh in tatters
upon them that have frightened
away a lot more than the birds.
Drowning
They were irreplaceable and forgettable,
inhabitants of the parish and speakers
of the Welsh tongue. I looked on and
there was one less and one less and one less.
They were not of the soil, but contributed
to it in dying, a manure not
to be referred to as such, but from which
poetry is grown and legends and green tales.
Their immortality was what they hoped for
by being kind. Their smiles were such as,
exercised so often, became perennial
as flowers, blossoming where they had been cut down.
I ministered uneasily among them until
what had been gaps in the straggling hedgerow
of the nation widened to reveal the emptiness
that was inside, where echoes haunted and thin ghosts.
A rare place, but one identifiable
with other places where on as deep a sea
men have clung to the last spars of their language
and gone down with it, unremembered but uncomplaining.
A Land
Their souls are something smaller
than the mountain above them
and give them more trouble.
They are not touched
either by the sun rising at morning
or the sun setting at evening.
They are all in shadow
pale and winding themselves about each other
inhibiting growth.
Death lives in this village, the ambulance plies
back and fore,
and they look at it through the eternal downpour
of their tears.
Who was it found
truth’s pebble in the stripling
river? No one believed him.
They have hard hands that money adheres
to like the scales
of some hideous disease, so that they grizzle
as it is picked off. And the chapel crouches,
a stone monster, waiting to spring,
waiting with the disinfectant of its language
for the bodies rotting with
their unsaid prayers.
It is at such times
that they sing, not music
so much as the sound of a nation
rending itself, fierce with all the promise
of a beauty that might have been theirs.
Saunders Lewis
And he dared them;
Dared them to grow old and bitter
As he. He kept his pen clean
By burying it in their fat
Flesh. He was ascetic and Wales
His diet. He lived off the harsh fare
Of her troubles, worn yet heady
At moments with the poets’ wine.
A recluse, then; himself
His hermitage? Unhabited
He moved among us; would have led
To rebellion. Small as he was
He towered, the trigger of his mind
Cocked, ready to let fly with his scorn.
Dead Worthies
Where is our poetry
but in the footnotes?
What laurels for famous
men but asterisks and numbers?
Branwen (Refer below).
Llywelyn – there is but
one, eternally on his way
to an assignation.
Morgan, no pirate,
emptying his treasure
from buccaneering
among the vocabulary. Ann,
handmaid of the Lord,
giving herself to the
Bridegroom, still virgin.
Williams Parry, quarrying
his cynghanedd among
Bethesda slate in
the twilight of the language.
Lloyd George, not David,
William, who in defence
of what his brother
had abandoned, made a case
out of staying at home.
Waiting
Here are mountains to ascend
not to preach from,
not to su
mmon one’s disciples
to, but to see far off the dream that is life:
winged yachts hovering over
a gentian sea; sun-making
windscreens; the human torrent
irrigating tunefully the waste places.
Ah, Jerusalem, Jerusalem!
Is it for nothing our chapels were christened
with Hebrew names? The Book rusts
in the empty pulpits above empty
pews, but the Word ticks inside
remorselessly as the bomb that is timed soon to go off.
Deprivation
All this beauty,
and all the pain
of beholding it emptied
of a people who were not worthy of it.
It is the morning of a world
become suddenly evening.
There was never any noon here.
Noon is an absence of shadow,
the stillness of contemplation,
of a balance achieved
between light and dark.
When they were born,
they began to die to the view
that has been taken from them
by others. Over their sour
tea they talk of a time
they thought they were alive.
God, in this light this
country is a brittle
instrument laid on one side
by one people, taken up
by another to play their twanged
accompaniment upon it, to which
the birds of Rhiannon
are refusing to sing.
Fugue for Ann Griffiths
In which period
do you get lost?
The roads lead
under a twentieth century
sky to the peace
of the nineteenth. There it is,
as she left it,
too small to be chrysalis
of that clenched soul.
Under the eaves the martins
continue her singing.
Down this path she set off
for the earlier dancing
of the body; but under the myrtle
the Bridegroom was waiting
for her on her way home.
To put it differently
yet the same, listen,
friend:
A nineteenth century
calm;
that is, a countryside
not fenced in
by cables and pylons,
but open to thought to blow in
from as near as may be
to the truth.
There were evenings
she would break it. See her