What they are saying is that there is life there, too; that the universe is the size it is to enable us to catch up.
They have gone on from the human; that shining is a reflection of their intelligence. Godhead is the colonisation by mind
of untenanted space. It is its own light, a statement beyond language of conceptual truth. Every night is a rinsing myself of the darkness
that is in my veins. I let the stars inject me with fire, silent as it is far, but certain in its cauterising of my despair. I am a slow
traveller. But there is more than time to arrive. Resting in the intervals of my breathing, I pick up the signals relayed to me from a periphery I comprehend.
Sound, too? The recorder that picks up everything picked up nothing but the natural background. What language does the god speak? And the camera's lens, as sensitive to an absence as to a presence, saw what? What is the colour of his thought? It was blank, then, the screen, as far as he was concerned? It was a bare landscape and harsh, and geological its time. But the rock was bright, the illuminated manuscript of the lichen. And a shadow, as we watched, fell, as though of an unseen writer bending over his work. It was not cloud because it was not cold, and dark only from the candlepower behind it. And we waited for it to move, silently as the spool turned, waited for the figure that cast it to come into view for us to identify it, and it didn't and we are still waiting.
‘They flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude
from ‘The Daffodils’ by William Wordsworth
An afternoon yellow and open-mouthed with daffodils. The sun treads the path among cedars and enormous oaks. It might be a country house, guests strolling, the rumps of gardeners between nursery shrubs.
I am reading poetry to the insane. An old woman, interrupting, offers as many buckets of coal as I need. A beautiful chestnut-haired boy listens entirely absorbed. A schizophrenic
on a good day, they tell me later. In a cage of first March sun a woman sits not listening, not feeling. In her neat clothes the woman is absent. A big, mild man is tenderly led
to his chair. He has never spoken. His labourer’s hands on his knees, he rocks gently to the rhythms of the poems. I read to their presences, absences, to the big, dumb labouring man as he rocks.
He is suddenly standing, silently, huge and mild, but I feel afraid. Like slow movement of spring water or the first bird of the year in the breaking darkness, the labourer’s voice recites ‘The Daffodils’.
The nurses are frozen, alert; the patients seem to listen. He is hoarse but word-perfect. Outside the daffodils are still as wax, a thousand, ten thousand, their syllables unspoken, their creams and yellows still.
Forty years ago, in a Valleys school, the class recited poetry by rote. Since the dumbness of misery fell he has remembered there was a music of speech and that once he had something to say.
When he’s done, before the applause, we observe the flowers’ silence. A thrush sings and the daffodils are flame.
By Gillian Clarke from Letter from a Far Country (1982)
Gillian Clarke discussing and then reciting her poem ‘Miracle on St David’s Day’
Gillian remarks on her site: “All you need to know about this poem is that it is a true story. It happened in the ’70s, and it took me years to find a way to write the poem.“
The church is like the prow Of a smoky ship, moving On the down channel currents To the open sea. A stone
Figurehead, the flowing light Streams from it. From everywhere You can see Top Church, remote As high church is from chapel.
Church high on the summit Of the climbing town Where I was a child, where rain Runs always slantingly
On streets like tilted chutes Of grey sliding on all sides From the church, to sea and dock, To shopping streets and home.
Bresting the cloud, its stone Profile of an ancient priest Preaches continuity In the face of turning tides.
by Gillain Clarke from The Sundial (Gwasg Gomer, 1978)
Information: St Augustine’s Church is a Grade I listed Gothic Revival nineteenth-century parish church in Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, Wales. Wales has, historically, had a strong chapel community in the valleys where small community cogregations, with their lay preachers, were far more common than larger organised churches.
A message from God delivered by a bird at my window, offering friendship. Listen, such language! Who said God was without speech? Every word an injection to make me smile. Meet me, it says, to-morrow here at the same time and you will remember how wonderful to-day was: no pain, no worry; irrelevant the mystery, if unsolved. I gave you the X-ray eye for you to use not to prospect, but to discover the un-malignancy of love's growth. You were a patient, too, anaesthetised on truth's table with life operating on you with a green scalpel. Meet me, I say, to-morrow and I will sing it for you all over again, when you have come to.
