Text of poem - Chord. Where the lamb died a bird sings. Where a soul perishes what music? The cross is an old fashioned weapon, but its bow is drawn unerringly against the heart.

‘Chord’ - #RSThomas
(A Gathering of Friends for Moelwyn, Gomer 1992)
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - Summer Evening. Who can tell me the colour of the cut hay In the small meadows at the ending of the day, When the sun strokes it with long, golden hand, And breathless, quiet as angels, the trees stand Rooted in shadow, while the last rooks fly Lazily homeward under the painted sky? I know all the magic of the rainbow's hues And the bright spectrum in the morning dews, But here in the stillness of the summer weather The very Phoenix seems to shed its feathers. R. S. THOMAS

‘Summer Evening’ - #RSThomas
(The Stones of the Field, Druid Press)
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - OPINIONS. And this one says: 'Poetry is rhyming word for word'. And this one: 'Poetry is that which dies in translation'. 'It is the criticism of one art by another' Arnold murmurs. And Coleridge: 'Order beyond order'. 'And you?' I ask, looking at myself towards life's end in a pitiless mirror, 'What do you say poetry is?' No answer. Teeth must remain clenched on the sparerib of language I have rasped at fifty-odd years.

‘Opinions’ - #RSThomas
(Frieze, Issue 3, 1992)
#Barnau
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - The Marksman. Nature is still with us; the moon wanes and is not consumed. The only nostalgia is for language. Our muse now is the computer. Priming its software it fires round upon round of vocabulary in the poem's absence, wounding us ever more fatally with the accuracy of its information.

‘The Marksman’ - #RSThomas
(‘Agenda, 36.2, Autumn 1998)
#YrAnelwr
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - Brethren. Here I have no neighbours, unless those furthest off are closest to me, coloured brethren, unreasonably insisting on their palms' paleness, the identity of our shadows. I let my prayers deputise for my assistance: Tennyson's fountain irrigating nothing but the waterless territory of my conscience. My immunity in a racked world is a perquisite not for enjoyment. Over my shoulder from immaculate pools, as I stare down, stare all those faces behind bars. The tide changes with the punctuality of the guard changing, waves bayonet-bright, long-toothed as the salivating dogs are. Ilook at my thermometer at night that promises the frost's tinsel, that for others registers the degree below zero to which hope can fall.

‘Brethren’ - #RSThomas
(The Poetry Book Society Anthology 1988-1989, Hutchinson)
#Brodyr
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - Looking. I thought I heard a voice saying to me: 'Don't look now, but I made them, too.' What was I here for but to look? Through knotted fingers, a prisoner at a grating, I peered out at the men at the boardroom tables with no 'God is love' hanging on the wallpaper behind them; at others bent over their retorts, accomplices in the escape of the djinn out of its bottle. I saw the inventors of the white lie exporting it to a third world where truth was in tatters. I listened to the hands, expert on the guitar, tuning the human instrument until the strings broke. I saw the dove plucked of its feathers by too much fondling at the peace conference, and beat on the sky for an explanation. But the voice said: ‘I warned you not to look’.

‘Looking’ - #RSThomas
(The Poetry Book Society Anthology 1988-1989, Hutchinson)
#Edrych
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - Welsh Resort. R. S. Thomas. And always the south darkening for rain And the wind rising ... There are children here Who can sing. God knows their reason Not I, who see them making For manhood or womanhood with their heads] Empty, their hearts hardened against the Thrift, that in the old was counted For wisdom. They serve the machine Gladly, that takes their praise Like a god, smiling inscrutably To itself, doing the work They were meant for. In summer will come The manipulators of the machine With the dividends these cannot inherit.

‘Welsh Resort’ - #RSThomas
(Planet 1, 1970)
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - Don't look up so we do and are guilty. The old fear of the castle lingers. We call a taxi and the taxis are mafia controlled. Where is the freedom we fought for? The bridal veils are rigid with frost. The clock bells are husky with calling upon the cuckoo to come back. Down tall streets we get lost among iron- faced buildings. In a corner a cockroach that was once a man crouches. We push its rations towards it, feeding it with averted eyes on the rottenness of Europe.

‘Don't look up…’ - #RSThomas
(Babel September 2023)
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - The reports kept coming and coming. I gave up the newspapers. Let all my batteries run down, my licenses expire. I shared my meals with a house-mouse watched it filling itself full on a few crumbs. What genie had got into the room at the rubbing of my cold hands? As I looked at it, it turned into a small child, into hundreds of grey children, watching me with eyes like blackberry seeds to discover what I would do next with all the pieces of small change going mildew in my pocket.

‘The reports kept coming…’ - #RSThomas
(Babel, September 2023)
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - CITIZEN. Here for a while heard voices powerless to obey looked fear in the face was outstared by it mistook lust for love burned more than his fingers saw need lie dropped it a tear and passed on visitors from a far country beauty addressed him truth too he was no linguist keeping his balance without grace took one step forward and one back on the shining tightrope between dark and dark.

‘Citizen’ - #RSThomas
(‘Little Review’ 13-14, 1980)
#Dinesydd
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - BOOM. At the tables of the money-changers what fare for dinner? Bones they have picked clean; arteries run dry; stones that were once bread; and the hosts facetiously presiding, their teeth in rows in their mouths like cartridges waiting to be fired.

‘Boom’ - #RSThomas
(‘Little Review’ 13-14, 1980)
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - Bamboo Music On location in China turning up dragon's teeth; going to sleep in a pagoda, dreaming the yellow dream that is too similar to moonlight to be called a disease - Fu Chong had a wall-paper daughter whose eyes grew on a remote tree In becoming her pupil and were forbidden to strangers. inhering in the word 'love' I mastered the six forms of insult in conformity's garden Sipping my tea through the last straw I took in my Marx neat and had no grounds for complaint. in the East you begin at the smile and read backward at your peril to what the tale says: Who goes for a ride on the most uncomfortable tiger can never dismount.

‘Bamboo Music’ - #RSThomas
(The Cambridge Poetry Magazine No2, Spring 1984)
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - Pardon You are too kind. You do not say to us in so many words: If you had not asked for me, I would not have had to die. You would be right, though; our selfishness has condemned you to the lot of mortals. What penance will we do for it? My penance is in the daily balancing of accounts, the pence and half-pence of your existence against the blackness of the figure in the right-hand column. I have heard you laugh; I have seen you dancing finger to finger with your beloved, and have put these down on the left-hand side of the page. But the clock advances. At the first grey in your hair, at the first crick in your pleasure, the end looms that we have come to terms with through forgiveness of our parents of their betrayal. As we enter the shadow, our faces turn to you with that old look of a mortal, wondering can you forgive us what we have not forgiven ourselves?

‘Pardon’ - #RSThomas
(Critical Quarterly Vol 18 No1 Spring 1976)
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - Star of Stage and Screen. Hearty; a suspicion of shine to the eyelids; the well-known laugh punctual; signing the autograph books, capping joke with joke: the voice of an auctioneer selling himself. What that tie cost is what your grandfather worked for a fortnight for. He knows everything except what the small child, who claps because others are clapping, thinks. He is a name's public appearance. He is what human beings have made of a human being.

‘Star of Stage and Screen’ - #RSThomas
(Poetry Wales 12.1, 1976)
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - The Witness. And I, Thomas, saw the decline To evil. The old, bad ways Were re-learned. Men hired their Consciences; women grew hard, shrill. Nature had lost the ability To delight. Beauty was that which The eye, trained in money's aesthetic Sanctioned. Truth was a failure Of nerve. Meanwhile the earth turned From the light. The dark was the Darkness of the crucifixion Of love's body on a steel tree.

‘The Witness’ - #RSThomas
(Decal Poetry Review 1.1, 1972)
#yTyst
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - Saner than You Think. He shook his head. ' We are free, friend, to do only as we are told. There is a mathematics of the person that was worked out before our arrival; genes and cells are its modes. The messages come by invisible couriers and always we obey them, extenuating our time.' There was a sense of woe, as he spoke, as of a solemn orchestra playing. In intervals in the percussion of blood, a voice from the asylum of the affections could be heard singing : I believe in the impossibility of love.

‘Saner than You Think’ - #RSThomas
("Night Ride and Sunrise” Celtion Poetry, Aberystwyth 1978)
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - THE LANE I looked up and the lane was Empty. Where have they gone To, the people Who walked there with life On their backs, listening To the wind in the trees' Joints; negligible men Of the land, but big with A dream, costly as the sky's Pearl? Outward at dawn They went and returned Evenings, so that I could tell The hour. While life elsewhere Renewed itself, it here sickened And died, drying on the boughs Of these men in the late Sun. Were they too slow For a world that has places To go and vehicles To arrive? 1 know next, When I look, the lane will be full Once again with the frantic collectors Of pieces of the smashed dream.

‘The Lane’ - #RSThomas
(Critical Review 11.1 Spring 1969)
#yLôn
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - R. S. Thomas CERIDWEN Ceridwen, the rain's bangles Hang on you; you are crisp As a lettuce and as cool As a shadow. Your white teeth Are the keys Of a piano; play for me The laughter I love you for. I am dry, Ceridwen, as old bark; shake off the dew Of your surfaces upon me.

‘Ceridwen’ - #RSThomas
(Transatlantic Review 18 [1965] )
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - In Town It is the same loneliness as wind And rain feel; all nature For that, fog, frost, snow: Nobody wants them. They go Quicksped; only the sun Is welcome, and it not At range that is too near On days that are too hot. Thick as the crowds go by, There is not one whose eye Strokes me; not one hand But would withdraw from my own, Should it alight there, migrant From the cold shores of the self. R. S. THOMAS

‘In Town’ - #RSThomas
(The Listener Vol LXVII No 1722, March 29 1962)
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - EH? Davies said life was long; There was a sameness in the song. Pugh thought it all too brief, The fruit bad before the leaf Turned. How is it with you, Who have neither the greed of Pugh Nor Davies' lack of zest For the red meat on the breast? - R. S. Thomas

‘Eh?’ - #RSThomas
(New Poems 1963 - A P.E.N Anthology of Contemporary Poetry - Hutchings & Co)
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - Epiphany. Three kings? Not even one any more. Royalty has gone to ground, its journeyings over. Who now will bring gifts and to what place? In the manger there are only the toys and the tinsel. The child has become a man. Far off from his cross in the wrong season he sits at table with us with on his head the fool's cap of our paper money.

‘Epiphany’ - #RSThomas
(Frequencies, Macmillan)
#Ystwyll
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - A Farmer. A man so small in the green surge of grass - Lapping his limbs, yet stranger to despair, Sure of his mastery in the age-old war Of fibre and sinew, blood and bone With the crude earth and the indifferent stone. Ah, could we appropriate for the subtler strife Of mind and spirit with a seven-fold death Tithe of his courage, tithe of his faith, How firm the gesture of each puny life! R. S. THOMAS

‘A Farmer’ - #RSThomas
( "Wales" [No2 Oct/Nov/Dec 1943] )
#Ffermwr
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - To Church. You sat in the stone church; To what secret prayers Did your lips say, Amen? The preacher spoke from the high Pulpit, his quick words Bounced on your mind's crust. You were not there to learn Agility of a creed Grown nimble from keeping Its balance on smooth tongues. You sat in the tall pew; No new vows were wrung From your hard heart, pardon, Hovering on the air, Had no place to go. You went down on your knees With the rest; the priest's blessing Fell on you like the tree's Shadow in which at last Your crossed bones were buried.

‘To Church’ - #RSThomas
(Poetry, 100.2, (1962): 81-2)
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - NO. Once in this corner a man stood, Not of your race; but his thick blood Was dark as yours, the same poison Tainted it at its far source In time and space. He asked no reason For the sure way that his hand turned To violence, nor why in its course The dream blew where the deed had burned. Are you better than he, that the glib questions Multiply at your tongue's tip? That punishment follows the hand's slip More speedily? You have not put on From wardrobes of the elate mind His bright clothes of sunlight and wind.

'No' - #RSThomas
(Poetry, 100.2, (1962): 82)
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - THE QUESTION. Who is skilled to read The strange epitaph of the salt weed Scrawled on our shores? Who can make plain The thin, dark characters of rain, Or the hushed speech of wind and star In the deep-throated fir? Was not this the voice that lulled Job's seething mind to a still calm, Yet tossed his heart to the racked world?

‘The Question’ - #RSThomas
(The Stones of the Field, Druid Press)
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - Coming. To be crucified again? To be made friends with for his jeans and beard? Gods are not put to death any more. Their lot now is with the ignored. I think he still comes stealthily as of old, invisible as a mutation, an echo of what the light said, when nobody attended; an impression of eyes, quicker than to be caught looking, but taken on trust like flowers in the dark country towards which we go.

#Advent
‘Coming’ - #RSThomas
(Experimenting with an Amen, Macmillan)
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - Forest Dwellers. Men who have hardly uncurled from their posture in the womb. Naked. Heads bowed, not in prayer, but in contemplation of the earth they came from, that suckled them on the brown milk that builds bone not brain. Who called them forth to walk in the green light, their thoughts on darkness? Their women, who are not Madonnas, have babes at the breast with the wise, time-ridden faces of the Christ child in a painting by a Florentine master. The warriors prepare poison with love's care for the Sebastians of their arrows. They have no God, but follow the contradictions of a ritual that says life must die that life may go on. They wear flowers in their hair.

‘Forest Dwellers’ - #RSThomas
(Between Here and Now, Macmillan)
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - The Presence. I pray and incur silence. Some take that silence for refusal. I feel the power that, invisible, catches me by the sleeve, nudging towards the long shelf that has the book on it I will take down and read and find the antidote to an ailment. I know its ways with me; how it enters my life, is present rather before I perceive it, sunlight quivering on a bare wall. Is it consciousness trying to get through? Am I under regard? It takes me seconds to focus, by which time it has shifted its gaze, looking a little to one side, as though I were not here. It has the universe to be abroad in. There is nothing I can do but fill myself with my own silence, hoping it will approach like a wild creature to drink there, or perhaps like Narcissus to linger a moment over its transparent face.

‘The Presence’ - #RSThomas
(Between Here and Now, Macmillan)
#YPresenoldeb #ThePresence
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - Flowers. But behind the flower is that other flower which is ageless, the idea of the flower, the one we smell when we imagine it, that as often as it is picked blossoms again, that has the perfection of all flowers, the purity without the fragility. Was it a part of the plan for humanity to have flowers about it? They are many and beautiful, with faces that are a reminder of those of our own children, though they come painlessly from the bulb's womb. We trouble them as we go by, so they hang their heads at our unreal progress. If flowers had minds, would they not think they were the colour eternity is, a window that gives on a still view the hurrying people must come to and stare at and pass by?

‘Flowers’ - #RSThomas
(Between Here and Now, Macmillan)
#Blodau #Flowers
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem - Bent. Heads bowed over the entrails, over the manuscript, the block, over the rows of swedes. Do they never look up? Why should one think that to be on one's knees is to pray? The aim is to walk tall in the sun. Did the weight of the jaw bend their backs, keeping their vision below the horizon? Two million years in straightening them out, and they are still bent over the charts, the instruments, the drawing-board, the mathematical navel that is the wink of God.

‘Bent’ - #RSThomas
(Between Here and Now, Macmillan)
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem