Text of poem - Dialectic. They spoke to him in Hebrew and he understood them; in Latin and Italian and he understood them. Speech palled on them and they turned to the silence of their equations. But God listened to them as to a spider spinning its web from its entrails, the mind swinging to and fro over an abysm of blankness. They are speaking to me still, he decided, in the geometry I delight in, in the figures that beget more figures. I will answer them as of old with the infinity I feed on. If there were words once they could not understand, I will show them now space that is bounded but without end, time that is where they were or will be; the eternity that is here for me and for them there; the truth that with much labour is born with them and is to be sloughed off like some afterbirth of the spirit.

‘Dialectic’ - #RSThomas
(Frequencies, Macmillan)
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