Showing posts with label R. S. Thomas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label R. S. Thomas. Show all posts

Friday, September 18, 2020

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








Thursday, March 29, 2012

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


Wednesday, February 1, 2012

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



Monday, December 5, 2011

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)




Friday, August 19, 2011

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


Saturday, October 2, 2010

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

Saturday, July 24, 2010

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

Friday, June 4, 2010

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





Saturday, September 19, 2009

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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