Fingertips brushing hot, soft passion and laughing
Like a babe, drunk on sound and made mad
By cobweb sobrieties, made mad by ancestors,
Mad by earlier gods who required always the best sacrifices:
The first sons, the first lamb, the first daughter, the first grain.
See him fall burning, head downwards, like Blake in the night.
See him wish petticoats to lift and seed to be cast.
See him turn to serpent, turn to tree, turn to the gate unlocked,
And run into the world, naked, naked, naked, clothed in dreaming.
Released from the ocean’s fist, a sunlight shout, dazzling
.
Dylan Thomas is one of my favorite poets. However, I do weary of the overexposure given to his (few) easier pieces, Fern Hill, Do not go gentle, Under Milk Wood and so on. The majority of his works are catastrophes of piled imagery singing so deep as to bamboozle everyone not simply happy to delight in ecstatic sound and image. His chaos, too, is usually so skilfully structured that he can hide rhyme structures seamlessly into them. On this occassion, I opened his collected works at random, and was as usual blown away by the heavy gold-threaded brocade of his lines.
I, not I, cannot lean against this luscious, deadly heat.
We are not roses, to drop our heads, to scatter petals,
To grow again as rain again splashes the dusty leaves.
Our grief all adds up, all weighs down.
These winds, these fires, these bitter, clever bombs, we cannot fight.
There are no winners, just braggers who will fall as well, soon enough,
Choked on the unguent of their profit, the poisons they excused.
Our shades shall not even cool us,
not as the forest shade does at Crychan, at Cwm Henog.
There shall be no violets in that twilight we surrender to at last.
There shall be no streams of delight, no wells of peace.
No tumbling nant at Nant yr Onnen nor crouching Ceirios.
The mists at Cwm Dyfnant:
they will be a smouldering of bracken and barbed wire.
Shadows, shadows.
A weather of shadows. A cloud of shame,
Claws of rock clambering from sunless cleft to cheer the last demise,
The victory of heat and blood,
The will to win, whatever.
The old, the ever, the same.
The truth of prophecy, the dregs, the well-worn path.
There shall be no competition then.
No mastery. No tenderness.
No tongue to sing the rhythms of praise, (the eloquent lies),
not to man, not to God, not to the primroses, not to the speckled thrush.
There shall be no golden chair on the hillside, then.
No crown. No applause.
No reply when the question is asked.
No one left to call for peace.
The sword unsheathed, the petals falling, the kites spiralling,
The fields bare and thistle-browed.
In the end, we shall see that there was nothing,
After all, to chase after, nothing to win.
The great blue skies,
piercing blue once more, over all,
And the cuckoos returned to Garn Wen,
the curlews to Cefn Gast.
—
This was one of my entries for this year’s Llanwrtyd Eisteddfod. In the end I submitted two poems from a series of seven on the same title. I shall be posting them all here soon enough.
