when we are weak

 

 

 

When we are weak, we are

strong.  When our eyes close

on the world, then somewhere

within us the bush

burns.  When we are poor

and aware of the inadequacy

of our table, it is to that 

uninvited the guest comes.

 

 

 

 

~ R. S. Thomas

art by Picasso

acting

Being unwise enough to have married her

I never knew when she was not acting.

‘I love you’ she would say; I heard the audiences

Sigh. ‘I hate you’; I could never be sure

They were still there. She was lovely. I

Was only the looking-glass she made up in.

I husbanded the rippling meadow

Of her body. Their eyes grazed nightly upon it.

Alone now on the brittle platform

Of herself she is playing her last role.

It is perfect. Never in all her career

Was she so good. And yet the curtain

Has fallen. My charmer, come out from behind

It to take the applause. Look, I am clapping too.

~ R. S. Thomas 

from The Poems of R. S. Thomas

Born Ronald Stuart Thomas in Cardiff, Wales, 1913. He was a Luddite, viewing modern conveniences as distractions that cause us to neglect our spiritual health. He and his wife Elsi lived in a small and almost primitive stone cottage for much of their marriage, and their son, Gwydion, remembered his father preaching against the evils of the refrigerator and the washing machine from his pulpit. His poems were as austere as his lifestyle, and he once wrote: "A recurring ideal, I find, is that of simplicity. At times there comes the desire to write with great precision and clarity, words so simple and moving that they bring tears to the eyes."  Mr. Thomas died in 2000.

~ comments from  writers almanac

winter dreams and butterflys

Winter

Evening. A fire

in the grate and a fire

outside, where a robin

is burning. How they both

sing, offering a friendship

unacceptable to the hand

that is as vulnerable to the one

as it is treacherous to the other.

Ah, time, enemy of their music,

reducing fuel to feathers, feathers

to ash, it was, but a moment ago,

spring in this tinder: flames

in flower that are now embers

on song's hearth.

The leaves fall

from a dark tree, brimming

with shadow, fall on one who,

as Borges suggested,

is no more perhaps than the dream God

in his loneliness is dreaming.

~ R. S. Thomas

from  Mass for Hard Times

You have wakened not out of sleep, 

but into a prior dream, 

and that dream lies within another, and so on, 

to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. 

The path that you are to take is endless, 

and you will die before you have truly awakened.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Once Chuang Tzu dreamt  he was a butterfly, 

a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, 

happy with himself and doing as he pleased. 

 He didn't know he was Chuang Tzu. 

 Suddenly he woke up and there he was, 

solid and unmistakable Chuang Tzu. 

 But he didn't know if he was Chuang Tzu who had dreamt he was a butterfly, 

or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu.

~ Chuang Tzu

from The Complete Chuang Tzu

translated by Burton Watson

in church

Often I try

To analyse the quality

Of its silences.  Is this where God hides

From my searching?  I  have stopped

to listen,

After the few people have gone,

To the air recomposing itself

For vigil.  It has waited like this

Since the stones grouped themselves

about it.

These are the hard ribs

Of a body that our prayers have failed

To animate.  Shadows advance

From their corners to take possession

Of places the light held

For an hour.  The bats resume

Their business.  The uneasiness of the pews

Ceases.  There is no other sound

In the darkness but the sound of a man 

Breathing, testing his faith

On emptiness, nailing his questions 

One by one to an untenanted cross.

~ R. S. Thomas

from Parabola (winter 2011-2012)

kneeling

.

Moments of great calm, 

Kneeling before an altar 

Of wood in a stone church 

In summer, waiting for the God 

To speak; the air a staircase 

For silence; the sun's light 

Ringing me, as though I acted 

A great role. And the audiences 

Still; all that close throng 

Of spirits waiting, as I, 

For the message. 

Prompt me, God; 

But not yet. When I speak, 

Though it be you who speaks 

Through me, something is lost. 

The meaning is in the waiting. 

~ R. S. Thomas

with thanks to whiskey river

fresh always with new tears

A slow singer, but loading each phrase

With history’s overtones, love, joy

And grief learned by his dark tribe

In other orchards and passed on

Instinctively as they are now,

But fresh always with new tears.

~ R.S. Thomas

 “A Blackbird Singing”

art by Sandra Merwin

But the silence in the mind

But the silence in the mind

is when we live best, within

listening distance of the silence

we call God.  This is the deep 

calling to deep of the psalm-

writer, the bottomless ocean

We launch the armada of

our thoughts on, never arriving.

It is a presence, then,

whose margins are our margins;

that calls us out over our 

own fathoms.  What to do

but draw a little nearer to

such ubiquity by remaining still?

~ R. S. Thomas

The Moor

It was like a church to me.

I entered it on soft foot,

Breath held like a cap in the hand.

It was quiet.

What God was there made himself felt,

Not listened to, in clean colours

That brought a moistening of the eye,

In movement of the wind over grass.

There were no prayers said. But stillness

Of the heart's passions -- that was praise

Enough; and the mind's cession

Of its kingdom. I walked on,

Simple and poor, while the air crumbled

And broke on me generously as bread.

~ R. S. Thomas

art by: roger jardine

The Bright Field

.

...

I have seen the light break through

to illuninate a small field

for a while and gone my way

and forgotten it. But that was the pearl

of great prize, the one field that had

the treasure in it.  I realize now

that I must give all that I have

to possess it.  Life is not hurrying

...

on to a receding future not handering after

an imagined past, It is the turning

aside like Moses to the miracle

of the lit bush. To a brightness

that seems as transitory as your youth

once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

...

~ R. S. Thomas

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