It appears before us,
wringing its dry hands,
quoting from Nietzsche’s book,
from Schopenhauer.
Sing us, we say,
more sunlit occassions;
the child by the still pool
multiplying reflections.
It remains unconsoled
in its dust-storm of tears,
remembering the Crusades,
the tortures, the purges.
But time passes by;
it commits adultery
with it to father the cause
of its continued weeping.
by R. S. Thomas
from Later Poems (1983)
So we know
she must have said something
to him – What language,
life? Oh, what language?
Thousands of years later
I inhabit a house
whose stone is the language
of its builders. Here
by the sea they said little.
But their message to the future
was: Build well. In the fire
of an evening I catch faces
staring at me. In April,
when light quickens and clouds
thin, boneless presences
flit through my room.
Will they inherit me
one day? What certainties
have I to hand on
like the punctuality
with which, at the moon’s
rising, the bay breaks
into a smile as though meaning
were not the difficulty at all?
by R. S. Thomas
from Experimenting with an Amen (1986)
Take heart, Prytherch.
Over you the planets stand,
And have seen more ills than yours.
This canker was in the bone
Before man bent to his image
In the pool’s glass. Violence has been
And will be again. Between better
And worse is no bad place
For a labourer, whose lot is to seem
Stationary in traffic so fast.
Turn aside, I said; do not turn back.
There is no forward and no back
In the fields, only the year’s two
Solstices, and patience between.
by R. S. Thomas
from Pieta (1966)
There’s holy holy people
They are in capel bach –
They don’t like surpliced choirs,
They don’t like Sospan Fach.
They don’t like Sunday concerts,
Or women playing ball,
They don’t like William Parry much
Or Shakespeare at all.
They don’t like beer or bishops,
Or pictures without texts,
They don’t like any other
Of the nonconformist sects.
And when they go to Heaven
They won’t like that too well,
For the music will be sweeter
Than the music played in Hell.
by Idris Davies
For Adrian Mitchell
Hello and welcome to our industrial museum.
On your right there’s a slag-heap reclaimed…
a hill… another slag heap…
that one shaped as a landing-pad
for bird-like hang-gliders.
Notice the pit-wheels perfectly perserved
where you can buy mementoes
of the Big Strike and eat authentic cawl
at an austere soup-kitchen.
There mummified miners cough and spit
at the press of a button
and you can try their lungs on
to a tape-recording of Idris Davies’ poems.
That rubble was a 19th century chapel,
that pile of bricks an industrial estate.
The terraced houses all adorned
in red, white and blue as if royalty were visiting.
See how quaint the wax models
of women are, as they bow in homage
to polished doorsteps, the stuffed sheep
at the roadside give off a genuine odour.
by Mike Jenkins
from Invisible Times
In the Talking Shop
they spit out bones
which an auxiliary sweeps up:
they’re crushed and made into gloss
for the latest glamorous brochure.
They talk white paint, plush curtains,
flowers and plants in the foyer:
they shred leaves of Chaucer
to garnish an exhibition.
Cogs of paper push hands
and a clock somewhere
justifies its existence.
They decide to decide later.
All the pounds left over
from multi-gym exertions
are heaped on the floor
for clients to sketch
in their frequent boredom.
In the Talking Shop
originality is a luxury
nobody can afford:
and if you complain
the word-detectives soon arrest
your mouth and use it to bin
the scraped paint, dead flowers, shoddy curtains.
by Mike Jenkins
from This House, My Ghetto
Last night the sea heaved up a creature,
one I could not explain.
Half-boat, half-animal it seemed:
ribs of rusted tin, skull smooth as plastic.
My daughter played in its house of bones,
bouncing pebbles like syllables ringing.
She kept asking its name, how old was it?
Was it a dragon? Oil like blood dripped.
‘I don’t know!’ I said (sounding unscientific):
she pulled out bolts of its neck to sit on.
I pursued it in books: the Bible dumb.
She ran in and out of its tunnel of questions.
by Mike Jenkins
from A Dissident Voice
