by R. S. Thomas
at the dance, round
and round, hand
in hand, weaving
invisible threads. When
you are young ... But
there was One
with his eye on her;
she saw him stand
under the branches.
History insists
on a marriage, but the husband was as cuckolded
as Joseph.
Listen again:
To the knocker at the door:
‘Miss Thomas has gone dancing.’
To the caller in time:
‘The mistress is sitting the dance
out with God at her side.’
To the traveller up learning’s
slope: ‘She is ahead of you on her knees.
She who had decomposed
is composed again in her hymns.
The dust settles on the Welsh language,
but is blown away in great gusts
week by week in chapel after chapel.’
Is there a scholarship that grows
naturally as the lichen? How
did she, a daughter of the land, come
by her learning? You have seen
her face, figure-head of a ship
outward bound? But she was not
alone; a trinity of persons
saw to it she kept on course
like one apprenticed since early
days to the difficulty of navigation
in rough seas. She described her turbulence
to her confessor, who was the more
astonished at the fathoms
of anguish over which she had
attained to the calmness of her harbours.
There are other pilgrimages
to make beside Jerusalem, Rome;
beside the one into the no-man’s-
land beyond the microscope’s carry.
If you came in winter,
you would find the tree
with your belief still crucified
upon it, that for her at all
times was in blossom, the resurrection
of one that had come seminally
down to raise the deciduous human
body to the condition of his body.
Hostilities were other peoples’.
Though a prisoner of the Lord
she was taken without fighting.
That was in the peace before
the wars that were to end
war. If there was a campaign
for her countrymen, it was one
against sin. Musically
they were conscripted to proclaim
Sunday after Sunday the year
round they were on God’s side. England
meanwhile detected its enemies
from afar. These made friends
out in the fields because
of its halo with the ancestral scarecrow.
Has she waited all these years
for me to forget myself
and do her homage? I begin
now: Ann Thomas, Ann Griffiths,
one of a thousand Anns chosen
to confound your parentage
with your culture – I know
Powys, the leafy backwaters
it is easy for the spirit to forget
its destiny in and put on soil
for its crown. You walked solitary
there and were not tempted,
or took your temptation as calling
to see Christ rising in April
out of that same soil and clothing
his nakedness like a tree. Your similes
were agricultural and profound.
As winter is forgiven by spring’s
blossom, so defoliated man,
thrusting his sick hand in the earth’s
side is redeemed by conviction.
Ann, dear, what can our scholarship
do but wander like Efyrnwy
your grass library, wondering at the absence
of all volumes but one? The question
teases us like the undying
echo of an Amen high up
in the cumulus rafters over Dolanog.
The theologians disagree
on their priorities. For her
the centuries’ rhetoric contracted
to the three-letter word. What was sin
but the felix culpa enabling
a daughter of the soil to move
in divine circles? This was before
the bomb, before the annihilation
of six million Jews. It appears now
the confession of a child before
an upholstered knee; her achievement
the sensitising of the Welsh
conscience to the English rebuke.
The contemporary miracle is the feeding
of the multitude on the sublime
mushroom, while the Jesus,
who was her lover, is a face
gathering moss on the gable
of a defunct chapel, a myth shifting
its place to the wrong end
of the spectrum under the Doppler
effect of the recession of our belief.
Three pilgrimages to Bardsey
equalling one to Rome – How close
need a shrine be to be too far
for the traveller of today who is in
a hurry? Spare an hour or two
for Dolanog – no stone cross,
no Holy Father. What question
has the country to ask, looking as if
nothing has happened since the earth
cooled? And what is your question?
She was young and was taken.
If one asked you: ‘Are you glad
to have been born?’ would you let
the positivist reply for you
by putting your car in gear, or watch
the exuberance of nature in a lost
village, that is life saying Amen
to itself? Here for a few years
the spirit sang on a bone bough
at eternity’s window, the flesh trembling
at the splendour of a forgiveness
too impossible to believe in, yet believing.
Are the Amens over? Ann (Gymraeg)
you have gone now but left us with the question
that has a child’s simplicity and a child’s depth:
Does the one who called to you,
when the tree was green, call us
also, if with changed voice,
now the leaves have fallen and the boughs
are of plastic, to the same thing?
She listened to him.
We listen to her.
She was in time
chosen. We but infer
from the union of time
with space the possibility
of survival. She who was born
first must be overtaken
by our tomorrow.
So with wings pinned
and fuel rationed,
let us put on speed
to remain still
through the dark hours
in which prayer gathers
on the brow like dew,
where at dawn the footprints
of one who invisibly
but so close passed
discover a direction.
Formula
And for the soul
in its bone tent, refrigerating
under the nuclear winter,
no epitaph prepared
in our benumbed language
other than the equation
hanging half-mast like the after-
birth of thought: E = mc2.
Aubade
I awoke. There was dew,
and the voice of time singing:
It is too late to begin,
you are there already.
I went to the window
as to a peep-show: There she was
; all fly-wheels and pistons;
her smile invisible
as a laser. And, ‘No,’
I cried, ‘No’ turning away
into the computed darkness
where she was waiting
for me, with art’s stone
rolled aside from her belly
to reveal the place poetry had lain
with the silicon angels in attendance.
Cones
Simple in your designs,
infinite in your variations
upon them: the leaf’s veins,
the shell’s helix, the stars themselves
gyring down to a point
in the mind; the mind also
from that same point spiralling
outward to take in space.
Heartening that in our journeys
through time we come round not
to the same place, but recognise it
from a distance. It is the dream
we remember, that makes us say:
‘We have been here before.’ In
truth we are as far from it
as one side of the cone
from the other, and in between
are the false starts, the failures,
the ruins from which we climbed,
not to look down, but to feel your glance
resting on us at the next angle
of the gyre.
God, it is not your reflections
we seek, wonderful as they are
in the live fibre; it is the possibility
of your presence at the cone’s
point towards which we soar
in hope to arrive at the still
centre, where love operates
on all those frequencies
that are set up by the spinning
of two minds, the one on the other.
Testimonies
The first stood up and testified to Christ:
I was made in the image of man; he unmanned me.
The second stood up: He appeared to me
in church in a stained window. I saw through him.
The third: Patient of love, I went
to him with my infirmity, and was not cured.
The fourth stood up, with between his thighs
a sword. ‘He came not to bring peace’ he said.
The fifth, child of his time, wasted his time
asking eternity: ‘Who is my father and mother?’
So all twelve spoke, parodies of the disciples
on their way to those bone thrones from which they
would judge others.
Coming
To be crucified
again? To be made friends
with for his jeans and beard?
Gods are not put to death
any more. Their lot now
is with the ignored.
I think he still comes
stealthily as of old,
invisible as a mutation,
an echo of what the light
said, when nobody
attended; an impression
of eyes, quicker than
to be caught looking, but taken
on trust like flowers in the
dark country towards which we go.
The Fly
And the fly said: ‘Nothing
to do. May as well
alight here.’ No luck;
no poison. So man walked
immune down avenues
of vast promise, seeking
perfection. The fly
had it; filled in the time
flying, embroidering space
with the invisible meshwork
of flight’s thread; spun rainbows
from light’s spectrum. Man
worked more purposely
at his plans: immortality,
truth; killing the things would not
be killed, like time, love,
the one human, the other
one of the fly’s ilk.
What
is perfection? Anonymity’s
patent? A frame fitted
for effortless success
in conveying viruses
to the curved nostril?
I will not
be here long, but have seen
(among people) distorted
bodies, haloed with love,
shedding a radiance
where flies hung smaller
than the dust they say
man came from and to which,
I say, he will not return.
Apostrophe
Improvisers, he thinks,
making do with the gaps
in their knowledge; thousands of years
on the wrong track, consoling
themselves with the view by the way.
Their lives are an experiment
in deception; they increase
their lenses to keep a receding
future in sight. In arid
museums they deplore the sluggishness
of their ascent by a bone
ladder to where they took off
into space-time. They are orbited
about an unstable centre,
punishing their resources
to remain in flight.
There are no journeys,
I tell them. Love turns
on its own axis, as do beauty and truth,
and the wise are they
who in every generation
remain still to assess their nearness
to it by the magnitude of their shadow.
Fable
Winged life – why
respect it? A foretaste;
heaven dwellers? But look
what we do with what
we have – the smashed decibels,
the razed cities, all
to the ticking of the unhatched
egg in a Spartan temple.
Hebrews 1229
If you had made it smaller
we would have fallen off; larger
and we would never have caught up
with our clocks. Just right
for us to know things are there
without seeing them? Forgive
us the contempt our lenses
breed in us. To be brought near
stars and microbes does us no good,
chrysalises all, that pupate
idle thoughts. We have stared and stared, and not stared
truth out, and your name has occurred
on and off with its accompanying
shadow. Who was it said: Fear
not, when fear is an ingredient
of our knowledge of you? The mistake
we make, looking deep into the fire,
is to confer features upon a presence
that is not human; to expect love
from a kiss whose only property is to consume.
Roles
How old was he, when he asked
who he was, and receiving
no answer, asked who they
were, who projected images
of themselves on an unwilling
audience. They named him, adding
the preliminary politeness, endorsing
a claim to gentility he did not
possess. The advance towards Christian
terms was to an understanding of the significance
of repentance, courtesy put under greater
constraint; an effort to sustain the role
they insisted that he had written.
Who reaches such straits flees
to the sanctuary of his mirror for re-assurance
that he is still there, challenging the eyes
to look back into his own and not
at the third person over his shoulder.
Gift
Some ask the world
and are diminished
in the receiving
of it. You gave me
only this small pool
that the more I drink
from, the more overflows
me with sourceless light.
Harvest End
(From the Welsh of Caledfryn)
The seasons fly;
the flowers wither;
the leaves lie
on the ground. Listen
to the sad song
of the reapers: ‘Ripe
corn’, as over the sea
the birds go.
Suddenly the year
ends. The wind rages;
everything in its path
breaks. Dire weather;
in front of a stick
fire, fetched from
the forest, firm and infirm
cower within doors.
The longest of lives
too soon slips by.
Careers fold and with
them good looks fade.
Spring’s bloom is spent,
summer is done, too.
With a rush we come
to winter in the grave.
The Wood
A wood.
A man entered;
thought he knew the way
through. The old furies
attended. Did he emerge
in his right mind? The same
man? How many years
passed? Aeons? What is
the right mind? What does
‘same’ mean? No change of clothes
for the furies? Fast
as they are cut down
the trees grow, new
handles for axes.
There is a rumour from the heart
of the wood: brow
furrowed, mind
smooth, somebody huddles
in wide contemplation – Buddha,
Plato, Blake, Jung –
the name changes, identity
remains, pure being waiting
to be come at. Is it the self
that he mislaid? Is it why
he entered, ignoring
the warning of the labyrinth
without end? How many times
over must he begin again?
Biography
A life’s trivia: commit them
not to the page, but to the waste-basket
of time. What was special
about you? Did you write the great
poem? Find the answer to the question:
When a little becomes much?
You made war, campaigning upon the piano
that would surrender to the television.
Were you first in the race
for the cup of silver not to be drunk
from? You ran fast and came home breathless
to the platitudes of the language.
Were you tall? Taller than you
your best tales looked over your shoulder.
