R.S. Thomas
1. Some comfortable harbour, say,
tugs a boat like its own
from the sea. Moored,
strangeness brings the storm.
Nights flicker.
And there is the manse's attic
blown, one curtain,
a lighthouse marvelling
at the bouncing moon.
2. We stood accused
of reading him. Wrong
language, place, wrong century.
Though his shadows from the fields
match ours, he made his own world,
lashed it for not surviving.
Which way forward but back?
His territory only boulders
gripped like knuckles.
It was shrinking always.
Rage kept him reinforced -
until, falling short
of himself, in the light
that language cannot span,
he saw a rimless world
extend the gifted heart's idea
of self, which is poetry.
3. Wind in the throes of turning
sighs that we have no centre.
He is our capital of echoes.
Places we find ourselves
not often, store voices far
from aerials turned to base –
one voice can set the whole
wood calling. And one wood asks
how earth and the planets
hang together, trees lit
by a bright field,
mild locals in eternity.
He reaped necessities:
dreams, with slant light
through Our crowded sleep.
Waking, our harvest beyond
pylons skewering the hills,
was new land opened.
Page(s) 20
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