Message by R.S. Thomas

 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.
 
 
By R.S. Thomas
 
 
 from Experimenting with an Amen (1986) 

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Looking Glass by R.S. Thomas

 There is a game I play
 with a mirror, approaching
 it when I am not there,
 as though to take by surprise.
 
 the self that is my familiar. It
 is in vain. Like one eternally
 in ambush, fast or slow
 as I may raise my head, it raises
 
 its own, catching me in the act,
 disarming me by acquaintance,
 looking full into my face as often
 as I try looking at it askance.
 
 
 by R. S. Thomas
 from Experimenting with an Amen (1986) 

Nativity by R. S. Thomas

The moon is born

and a child is born,

lying among white clothes

as the moon among clouds


They both shine, but

the light from the one

is abroad in the universe

as among broken glass.


by R. S. Thomas

from Experimenting with an Amen (1986)

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)

Formula by R. S. Thomas

And for the soul

in its bone tent, refrigerating

under the nuclear winter,

no epitaph prepared


in our benumbed language

other than the equation

hanging half-mast like the after-

birth of thought: E = mc2.


by R. S. Thomas

from Experimenting with an Amen (1986)