HERE

I am a man now.
Pass your hand over my brow,
You can feel the place where the
brains grow.

I am like a tree,
>From my top boughs I can see
The footprints that led up to me.

There is blood in my veins
That has run clear of the stain
Contracted in so many loins.

Why, then, are my hands red
With the blood of so many dead?
Is this where I was misled?

Why are my hands this way
That they will not do as I say?
Does no God hear when I pray?

I have nowhere to go.
The swift satellites show
The clock of my whole being is slow.

It is too late to start
For destinations not of the heart.
I must stay here with my hurt.


(R. S. Thomas)

PISCES

Who said to the trout,
You shall die on Good Friday
To be food for a man
And his pretty lady?

It was I, said God,
Who formed the roses
In the delicate flesh
And the tooth that bruises.



SAINT ANTONY

Saint Antony in the sand saw shapes rising,
Formed by the wind, sinuous, lewd
As snakes dancing; their bitter poison
Entered the soul through his pale eyes.

Sleep came; the dances renewed
Upon the retina, the lids not proof
Against the orgy of the spheres.
Night long he ranged the Bacchanalian dark,
Himself the prey, the hunter and the wood.


EVANS

Evans? Yes, many a time
I came down his bare flight
Of stairs into the gaunt kitchen
With its wood fire, where crickets sang
Accompaniment to the black kettle's
Whine, and so into the cold
Dark to smother in the thick tide
Of night that drifted about the walls
Of his stark farm on the hill ridge.

It was not the dark filling my eyes
And mouth appalled me; not even the drip
Of rain like blood from the one tree
Weather-tortured. It was the dark
Silting the veins of that sick man
I left stranded upon the vast
And lonely shore of his bleak bed.


THE COUNTRY CLERGY

I see them working in old rectories
By the sun's light, by candlelight,
Venerable men, their black cloth
A little dusty, a little green
With holy mildew. And yet their skulls,
Ripening over so many prayers,
Toppled into the same grave
With oafs and yokels. They left no books,
Memorial to their lonely thought
In grey parishes; rather they wrote
On men's hearts and in the minds
Of young children sublime words
Too soon forgotten. God in his time
Or out of time will correct this.


IAGO PRYTHERCH

Iago Prytherch, forgive my naming you.
You are so far in your small fields
>From the word's eye, sharpening your blade
On a cloud's edge, no one will tell you
How I made fun of you, or pitied either
Your long soliloquies, crouched at your slow
And patient surgery under the faint
November rays of the sun's lamp.

Made fun of you? That was their graceless
Accusation, because I took
Your rags for theme, because I showed them
Your thought's bareness; science and art,
The mind's furniture, having no chance
To install themselves, because of the great
Draught of nature sweeping the skull.

Fun? Pity? No word can describe
My true feelings. I passed and saw you
Labouring there, your dark figure
Marring the simple geometry
Of the square fields with its gaunt question.
My poems were made in its long shadow
Falling coldly across the page.

"m-urana" <kosmicgeek@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1187794494.224552.104970@z24g2000prh.googlegr oups.com...

> There is blood in my veins
> That has run clear of the stain
> Contracted in so many loins.
>
> Why, then, are my hands red
> With the blood of so many dead?
> Is this where I was misled?
>
> Why are my hands this way
> That they will not do as I say?
> Does no God hear when I pray?
> (R. S. Thomas)


Innocence sat in the bath and looked at her hands.
Why are these hands red?
She tried not to look at her hands, her red hands.
And accepted the clear guilt of their redness.

R. S. Thomas is a clergyman in North Wales. Some of his poems resemble
certain aspects of Wordsworth in their power to evoke the dreariness
and grandeur of many human lives. His hill farmers have often been
dried up and emotionally starved by the sparsity of their lives but,
as in Iago Prytherch, they have a dignity and toughness which makes
pity irrelevant.

Pisces
The early Christians associated the Greek word for fish, Ichthus, with
Christ and used the diagram of a fish as the secret sign of their
religion. Through a fish - it is a trout here - R. S. Thomas meditates
on the necessity of the Crucifixion and God as the author of life and
death, joy and suffering.

Saint Antony
Saint Antony was born about A.D. 250 and died about A.D. 350. He was
an ascetic, the founder of monasticism, and in his solitary retreats
in lower Egypt he underwent violent temptations whose vivid, often
sexual imagery, has been an inspiration to a number of painters. The
last line sums up the poem; Saint Antony fought for salvation within
himself.

Here
The 'swift satellites' suggest our whole era of technological
invention. (Note that Thomas uses a mechanical image here - clock -
albeit a simple one, while earlier he has used an organic one - tree.)
The satellites' speed contrasts and accuses his life, which appears
slow and out of date by comparison. But he stays true to his humanity;
however painful it is his destiny.