R. S. Thomas

The idiot goes round and around With his brother in a bumping car At the fair. The famous idiot Smile hangs over the car’s edge, Illuminating nothing. This is mankind Being taken for a ride by a rich Relation. The responses are fixed: Bump, smile; bump, smile. And the current Is generated by the smooth flow Of the shillings. This is an orchestra Of steel with the constant percussion Of laughter. But where he should be laughing Too, his features are split open, and look! Out of the cracks come warm, human tears.

Evans? Yes, many a time I came down his bare flight Of stairs into the gaunt kitchen With its wood fire, where crickets sang Accompaniment to the black kettle’s Whine, and so into the cold Dark to smother in the thick tide Of night that drifted about the walls Of his stark farm on the hill ridge. It was not the dark filling my eyes And mouth apalled me; not even the drip Of rain like blood from the one tree Weather-tortured. It was the dark Silting the veins of that sick man I left stranded upon the vast And lonely shore of his bleak bed.

Being unwise enough to have married her I never knew when she was not acting. ‘I love you’ she would say; I heard the audiences Sigh. ‘I hate you’; I could never be sure They were still there. She was lovely. I Was only the looking-glass she made up in. I husbanded the rippling meadow Of her body. Their eyes grazed nightly upon it. Alone now on the brittle platform Of herself she is playing her last rôle. It is perfect. Never in all her career Was she so good. And yet the curtain Has fallen. My charmer, come out from behind It to take the applause. Look, I am clapping too.