The Film of God by R.S. Thomas

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.
 
 
 By R.S. Thomas
 from Frequencies (1978) 

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Snow Keeps Falling Night And Day by Varlam Shalamov

Snow keeps falling night and day –

some god, now turned more strict,

is sweeping out from his domain

scraps of his old manuscripts.

 

Sheaves of ballads, songs and odes,

all that now seems bland or weak –

he sweeps it down from his high clouds,

caught up now by newer work.

 

by Варлам Тихонович Шаламов (Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov)

(1950 – or at least the incident which inspired the poem occurred then)

translated by Robert Chandler

Gwladus Ddu by R. S. Thomas

(from the Welsh of G. J. Williams)

 

It was an old white-friar who wrote

on yellowing parchment amongst tales

of the Welsh princes these words:

‘That year was buried Gwaldus Ddu.’

 

What was it made a brother

in his cell insert this in his story?

Did he taste heaven once in seeing

the sun brighten the darkness of Gwaldus Ddu?

 

And I, too, by my fireside remembered,

seeing Eryri’s cover white as wool,

that seven hundred winters had grizzled it

since summer basked in the hair of Gwladus Ddu.

 

Just now behind the manuscript’s account

of old, bold knights I saw a face

bloodless and unsmiling and the words:

‘That year was buried Gwladus Ddu.’

 

by R. S. Thomas

from No Truce With The Furies (1995)