R. S. Thomas

I am, as you know, Walter Llywarch, Born in Wales of approved parents, Well goitred, round in the bum, Sure prey of the slow virus Bred in quarries of grey rain. Born in autumn at the right time For hearing stories from the cracked lips Of old folk dreaming of summer, I piled them on to the bare hearth Of my own fancy to make a blaze To warm myself, but achieved only The smoke’s acid that brings the smart Of false tears into the eyes. Months of fog, months of drizzle; Thought wrapped in the grey cocoon Of race, of place, awaiting the sun’s Coming, but when the sun came, Touching the hills with a hot hand, Wings were spread only to fly Round and round in a cramped cage Or beat in vain at the sky’s window. School in the week, on Sunday chapel: Tales of a land fairer than this Were not so tall, for others had proved it Without the grave’s passport, they sent The fruit home for ourselves to taste. Walter Llywarch—the words were a name On a lost letter that never came For one who waited in the long queue Of life that wound through a Welsh valley. I took instead, as others had done Before, a wife from the back pews In chapel, rather to share the rain Of winter evenings, than to intrude On her pale body; and yet we lay For warmth together and laughed to hear Each new child’s cry of despair.

My garden is the wild Sea of the grass. Her garden Shelters between walls. The tide could break in; I should be sorry for this. There is peace there of a kind, Though not the deep peace Of wild places. Her care For green life has enabled The weak things to grow. Despite my first love, I take sometimes her hand, Following straight paths Between flowers, the nostril Clogged with their thick scent. The old softness of lawns Persuading the slow foot Leads to defection; the silence Holds with its gloved hand The wild hawk of the mind. But not for long, windows, Opening in the trees Call the mind back To its true eyrie; I stoop Here only in play.

All my life I was face to face with her, at meal-times, by the fire, even in the ultimate intimacies of the bed. You could have asked, then, for information about her? There was a room apart she kept herself in, teasing me by leading me to its glass door, only to confront me with my reflection. I learned from her even so. Walking her shore I found things cast up from her depths that spoke to me of another order, worshipper as I was of untamed nature. She fetched her treasures from art’s storehouse: pieces of old lace, delicate as frost; china from a forgotten period; a purse more valuable than anything it could contain. Coming in from the fields with my offering of flowers I found her garden had forestalled me in providing civilities for my desk. ‘Tell me about life,’ I would say, ‘you who were its messenger in the delivery of our child.’ Her eyes had a fine shame, remembering her privacy being invaded from further off than she expected. ‘Do you think death is the end?’ frivolously I would ask her. I recall now the swiftness of its arrival wrenching her lip down, and how the upper remained firm, reticent as the bud that is the precursor of the flower.

I emerge from the mind’s cave into the worse darkness outside, where things pass and the Lord is in none of them. I have heard the still, small voice and it was that of the bacteria demolishing my cosmos. I have lingered too long on this threshold, but where can I go? To look back is to lose the soul I was leading upwards towards the light. To look forward? Ah, what balance is needed at the edges of such an abyss. I am alone on the surface of a turning planet. What to do but, like Michelangelo’s Adam, put my hand out into unknown space, hoping for the reciprocating touch?

1 It is calm. It is as though we lived in a garden that had not yet arrived at the knowledge of good and evil. But there is a man in it. 2 There will be rain falling vertically from an indifferent sky. There will stare out from behind its bars the face of the man who is not enjoying it. 3 Nothing higher than a blackberry bush. As the sun comes up fresh, what is the darkness stretching from horizon to horizon? It is the shadow here of the forked man. 4 We have eaten the blackberries and spat out the seeds, but they lie glittering like the eyes of a man. 5 After we have stopped singing, the garden is disturbed by echoes; it is the man whistling, expecting everything to come to him. 6 We wipe our beaks on the branches wasting the dawn’s jewellery to get rid of the taste of a man. 7 Neverthless, which is not the case with a man, our bills give us no trouble. 8 Who said the number was unlucky? It was a man, who, trying to pass us, had his licence endorsed thirteen times. 9 In the cool of the day the garden seems given over to blackbirds. Yet we know also that somewhere there is a man in hiding. 10 To us there are eggs and there are blackbirds. But there is the man, too, trying without feathers to incubate a solution. 11 We spread our wings, reticulating our air-space. A man stands under us and worries at his ability to do the same. 12 When night comes like a visitor from outer space we stop our ears lest we should hear tell of the man in the moon. 13 Summer is at an end. The migrants depart. When they return in spring to the garden, will there be a man among them?

‘Poems from prison! About what?’ ‘Life and God.’ ‘God in prison? Friend, you trifle with me. His face, perhaps, at the bars, fading like life.’ ‘He came in with the warder, striving with him. Where else did the severity of the man spring from, but awareness of a charity he must overcome?’ ‘The blows, then, were God chastening the beloved! Who was the more blessed, the dispenser or receiver of them?’ ‘It is the same outside. Bars, walls but make the perspective clear.Deus absconditus! We ransack the heavens, the distance between stars; the last place we look is in prison, his hideout in flesh and bone.’ ‘You believe, then?’ ‘The poems are witness. If his world contracted, it was to give birth to the larger vision. Not meadows empty of him, animal eyes, impersonal as glass, communicate God. On the bare walls of a cell the oppressor watches the diminishing of his human shadow, as he withdraws from the light.’

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.

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. To-morrow, 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.

There was Dai Puw. He was no good. They put him in the fields to dock swedes, And took the knife from him, when he came home At late evening with a grin Like the slash of a knife on his face. There was Llew Puw, and he was no good. Every evening after the ploughing With the big tractor he would sit in his chair, And stare into the tangled fire garden, Opening his slow lips like a snail. There was Huw Puw, too. What shall I say? I have heard him whistling in the hedges On and on, as though winter Would never again leave those fields, And all the trees were deformed. And lastly there was the girl; Beauty under some spell of the beast. Her pale face was the lantern By which they read in life’s dark book The shrill sentence: God is love.

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.