Countering by R. S. Thomas

Then there is the clock's

commentary, the continuing

prose that is the under-current

of all poetry. We listen

to it as, on a desert island,

men do to the subdued

music of their blood in a shell.


Then take my hand that is

of the bone the island

is made of, and looking at

me say what time it is

on love's face, for we have

no business here other than

to disprove certainties the clock knows.


by R. S. Thomas

from Experimenting with an Amen (1986)

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Here by R. S. Thomas

I am a man now.

Pass your hand over my brow,

You can feel the place where the brains grow.

 

I am like a tree,

From my top boughs I can see

The footprints that led up to me.

 

There is blood in my veins

That has run clear of the stain

Contracted in so many loins.

 

Why, then, are my hands red

With the blood of so many dead?

Is this where I was misled?

 

Why are my hands this way

That they will not do as I say?

Does no God hear when I pray?

 

I have nowhere to go.

The swift satellites show

The clock of my whole being is slow.

 

It is too late to start

For destinations not of the heart.

I must stay here with my hurt.

 

by R. S. Thomas

from Tares (1961)

‘No, not the moon – the bright face of a clock’ by Osip Mandelstam

No, not the moon – the bright face of a clock

glimmers to me. How is it my fault

that I perceive the feeble stars as milky?

And I hate Batyushkov’s unbounding arrogance:

What time is it? Someone simply asked –

and he replied to them: eternity!

 

by Осип Эмильевич Мандельштам (Osip Emilyevich Mandelshtam. His surname is commonly latinised as Mandelstam)

(1912)

translated by Boris Dralyuk

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Fun fact: Such an exchange did occur between Konstanin Batyushkov and his doctor and in his poem ‘For The Tombstone of a Little Girl’ he imagined a dead baby saying to her parents ‘Dear ones, don’t cry! / Envy my ephemerality; / I did not know this life, / And know eternity’ (translation by Peter France).