Thomas was a great poet of the second half of the 20th Century. I mean one of the great poets. Welsh (thus the Anglo-spellings), an Anglican priest, often he wrote as if to reconcile his despair in the direction of humanity and the silence of God with his faith. He wrote about, and universalized, marriage, Welsh nationalism and what he referred to as "the machine," by which I think he meant a coldly engineered future that is slowly crowding out the influence of the human soul. Some of his greatest work was done in and about old age. This one, ostensibly about traveling, I came upon while traveling myself.
Somewhere
Something to bring back to show
you have been there: a lock of God's
hair, stolen from him while he was
asleep; a photograph of the garden
of the spirit. As has been said,
the point of travelling is not
to arrive, but to return home
laden with pollen you shall work up
into the honey the mind feeds on.
What are our lives but harbours
we are continually setting out
from, airports at which we touch
down and remain in too briefly
to recognise what it is they remind
us of? And always in one
another we seek the proof
of experiences it would be worthy dying for.
Surely there is a shirt of fire
this one wore, that is hung up now
like some rare fleece in the hall of heroes?
Surely these husbands and wives
have dipped their marriages in a fast
spring? Surely there exists somewhere,
as the justification for our looking for it,
the one light that can cast such shadows.
R.S. elsewhere on the blog: "Song at the Year's Turning"
No comments:
Post a Comment