R S Thomas

<Audio>

Why?

Because his words were the

candlelight in their tears,

the people of his years,

hardened in their land,

bowed under his dark sky,

he under his question, why?

Why am I still waiting

for His answer?

What is my place

in this, their place?

Forever on his knees he asked

again, and again,

why?

To which, I reply,

who else could? But

R S Thomas

Teddyboy

Here is a teddy boy,

drawn by my Freddy boy.

Are you ready boy?

Life ahoy! 

Grandpa.

Do you sea?

We embrace each day, out in the bay.
For there can be no other way,
to say - I love you deep sea.
Please, say that you love me.
Whisper it in the roar of your kisses.
But, alas, although I am your slave,
you will never be my mistress.

Chapel once the beatitude

<Audio>

Upon the going back

                                    to the village chapel,

that beatitude of old ladies,

their quiet reassurance

                                       of having pierced the veil,

for which the pub men in their smoke

                                                                   had not a laugh

not even for

                  the grace of the Sunday school teachers.

For they had grown away, as men do,

                                                           as we knew we would.

Must!

So.

We asked the deacon what is God?

And he said God is love.

We asked the deacon what is love.

And he said love is God.

Then we all walked away.

Now the chapel has a bramble collar,

a thorn crown, bleeding down upon its shoulder.

      Grass grown steps

                                      and a rusty handrail.

Windows of dry tears where the flaky paint

pricked as it snowed.

“No entry”

Cannot go inside – God forbid!

But the conspirator crack said look,

see the organ,

                        that cadaver white in a dusty shroud.

In a rictus of bared teeth, a sneer

      where once a wood stained veneer

reverberated to the hymns, and where

      cold bums sat hard,

             attending the sermons

                      with a wrinkled brow.

What now?

                    I saw a bird skull white upon a post.

What significance can a poet drag from that?

A child’s feral laugh at a sling shot trophy.

Probably. But still sinister in my dark thoughts.

                  Is that all this stone box is reduced to?

Even the pub has gone.

The angels and daemons have declared a truce.

Laughed at my pilgrimage to the locked doors.

My nails clawing at the plaster-shorn walls

of the hall where we laughed

at the absurdity of the Band of Hope,

                                                        even as we drank it in.

Oh, this bloody congealed dust,

the trespassers on our prayers,

our kicking and flailing at the jungle

of weeds that did fall on stony ground,

and yet have grown to choke the charity,

the swirling veils of the old ladies,

who held our hands

                                   in the snow-light walking home.

How can a chapel become deconsecrated?

Even on the cross the cry of “why?” was suffered.

I leave my shadow to keep watch over

my memories. To call me back should

any of the congregation return.

Piercing the veil – as they say.

To flow with spectral fingers pointing

                                                                   to the past.

Then I must and will return,

and on our knees

we will sublimate into the billowing dust

as our pasts go crumbling down.

Listen, listen!

                        They are singing in the Cymanfa Ganu.

Dear God, why did you let this chapel die?

Ask the deacon, why did you walk away?

Oh to be (by faith) deluded

Oh to be (by faith) deluded,
in the autumn of our lives,
when all our hopes lie denuded,
it would be so very, very nice,
to blend as one, with a swarm bees,
safe and sound, in their tiny little hives,
grains of hope rolling in a cosmic sea,
under a heavenly carapace.

Autumn leaves

<Audio>

Dawn's slept breath upon my window lies,
truant in the morning sun,
and sliding wraith-like from my widening eyes,
inveighs of Autumn, dare not go on and on.

Stretching fingers of the early rays,
fair lie upon my face and toes.
Some petals stay, some decompose,
and so it goes, these middling days.

Empty-nested, jewel-webbed,
the condemned in silence mooch around.
Dare not even whisper Fall,
or of weather hard upon the Winter ground.

How can I break this spell,
this toll of fears, that in part
lies embowered around an ancient heart,
dead beat in dread of dumb Winter's knell.

Bad luck? To splinter this mirror isomer of Spring,
to fling, exalted, the golden leaves of a poet's tree.
The year's death, dulled opiate by these days, doth bring
a mahogany of smiles, for Autumn halted, upon a golden dowry.

infinity

                                                                                infinite   

 ∞      an infinite number of poems
 ∞         written by an infinite number of poets
 ∞             interpreted by an infinite number of people
 ∞          in an infinite number of their ways
 ∞     select your horizon and follow it to
                                                                                 infinity 

Why?

After the much-needed mass extinction,
following the energy of evolution,
something will look back
at our egocentric folly
and ask why.

Tabitha

<Audio>

Tabitha.
                        Fast asleep.

Do you remember how you wept?
When you were a lone lost shadow,
with not one cold glance from
the tombstones
in the graveyard of kind words.

  What happenstance is this?

Snuggle down with me now,
and wrapped in the runes
of the catacombs,
doppelgängers of the twilight,
we will lay life's perfidy to rest.

  Together forever, and a day.

come storm's spice

<Audio>

come storm's spice
in siren calls
swim against
the flow
the strife of tide
my lonely bride
there's no life
for us
without it
in it

dark energy

<Audio>

upon the cinders of a midnight thought

in the back shack cobweb sheds

milked in the craw of the cow cat fields

thistled along the corrugated night

drawn to the black woods

nestled in chestnuts

fox streamed and crow nested

genuflecting to the edifice

of Tir John

of bricks uncounted

built by stone-dead men

for a million volts of power

humming this witching hour

lying blue upon the marsh

duck downed

in slinking sleep

the damned night unfurled

that sintered claw

that midnight cindered thought 

On the coast bus to Mumbles

<Audio>

The scream-spit sea in churning,

draws the pelted horizon down,  

and feral spumes the bus. 

   Not unlike the wind leaf scarf,

drawn around yon autumn girl, 

lonely and staring phone-ward,

on the storm-plough battling bus.

    Tight lipped in lipstick, period red,

face as pale as the white horse manes.

Until the sun comes a-sliding,

a lemonade of swallowed tears.

  Then “ding”, and trance-like,

she is off the bus, soon lost to us,

as we plod on and on.

Rebel 17 - 70 Rebel

<Audio>

Am I too old to be a rebel?

To be rebel without a cause?

We were back then of course.

We lived it, didn’t we?

Go back, now, without a pause,

and see how the rebel has been labelled;

see, they have given a label to his cause.

So, I guess, I am too old to be a rebel,

unless, unless, unless ...

I am! For today I have a cause,

(he bequeathed to me that cause).

And because that cause

arrived without a label,

(and label me too old to care),

then I am a rebel, aren’t I?

I did care
that I didn't care.

So there!

Despite

Autumn deceive not!
Take off that rouge, that pretty skirt of leaves.
Bite with spite, in the winter white,
snarl and gnarl, down to the bone.

My latest nature diary for Swansea News Network

My latest nature diary for Swansea News Network

http://swanseanewsnetwork.org/flying-to-flaming-october/

Monumental folly

<Audio>

And why are the graves so big or so small?

Angels pointing skyward with no hands at all.

Or standing rock-fast on feet with no toes,

in the crypt mists of autumn, dew drop nose.

And there lies a rusty chain carrying a ball,

pointed like a mace but with no face at all.

And angels, with frost-broken wings do yearn,

over slumped headstones, all golden embossed.

But see, there, a desiccated urn,

on a pauper grave, wooden and crossed.

And why are the gates locked on family mausoleums,

where their effigies in stone lie silently bedded?

And why is there a sculpted anchor with chain,

rocks and ropes, the white horse’s mane?
Set squares and dividers, here all the trades be.

But why on earth, should this matter to me?

Glossy marble phalluses, and angular obelisks are

lording it over lichen engraved and fading headstones,   

where, long ago, with dry tears was written,

the name of a child in infancy smitten,

or tell of the sad soldier who fell in the war,

or how husband and wife did pass hand in hand,

looking for their home in the promised land.

And why are the graves piled up so high?

Four and twenty black bones lie in a pie.

Too many for comfort at the closing gate bell.

To be in heaven is heaven,

but to be buried is hell.

So why remembrance in such a grand way?

To impress the ones left behind who surely will say ...

Why are the graves so big and so small?

Grandeur for some, for others, nothing at all!

Today, when on and on the grim strimmer grazes,

betwixt the grave grasses, splattering green blazers,

worn by headstone cricketers, long-shadowed and fielding,

or at the crease standing, just one last innings? 

With dusk comes the bone fox

trotting foxily home,

studiously ignoring,

until, when everything’s still,

crumbles the day,

in the twilight of gods.

Goodbye anon sleeper,

so tight in your box,

under your monuments,

be they big, tiny or small.

And reader remember,
what the tombstones say.
Death the dead leveler
is coming your way.

Haiku

Poet at sunset,

avid reader of the dawn.

Our pages are numbered.

Haiku

A wormhole in Wales?

R S and Dylan Thomas.

The vortex of words.

No way back

<Audio>

The dirt-cheap tears of nostalgia,

cannot halt two hearts in flight.

They go forward or they crash.

As we did that remember night.

Cannot jump with sodden parachutes,

wrung of my tears, your tears.

Or fall back, or fall back,

down all the years, the years.

For the dirt-cheap tears of nostalgia,

indulgent in first-love-locked eyes,

are, unfortunately, a one-way ticket,

for what never dies, has died.

The ghost of an idea

<Audio>

Prostrate on the ice sea of Ganymede,
something stirring deep beneath.

Aching, my clawing fingers bleed,

cut upon a sliver of that buried wreath.

That florid-berried grief of a mind dead-

sure that something must be said.

That something is pulsating at the core,

under an opalescent denial, indeed deplored.

There is an hypnotic, swaying cobra head,

quick of fang and venom - antidote?

Drill below the feelings of dread.

Drill through lifetimes of rote.

Drag the problem into a poem.

Address the topic, always there.

Pour your heart, at long last free

to roam, where

the sea of Ganymede is split asunder,

and, with flowers in our hair,

we blend and spin the essence,

of our embrace, with thoughts our fare.

Torpid of words, upon a sunlit bed,

in trance and upward glance,

submit to the cosmic happenstance,

of an: I see! Finally of its ambiguity bled.

Haiku Eye

I have just launched a new blog for Haiku poetry (3 line poems) along with an image for each poem.

http://haikueye.blogspot.co.uk/

Haiku

Deep my corpuscles,

bleeding regret, aching, but

it was so long ago.

Haiku

Rain chuckling gutters. 

Curtains handcuffing the night. 

Summer dies in sleep.