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R. S. Thomas

R. S. Thomas

Reflections

The furies are at home
in the mirror; it is their address.
Even the clearest water,
if deep enough can drown.
 
Never think to surprise them.
Your face approaching ever
so friendly is the white flag
they ignore. There is no truce
 
with the furies. A mirror’s temperature
is always at zero. It is ice
in the veins. Its camera
is an X-ray. It is a chalice
 
held out to you in
silent communion, where gaspingly
you partake of a shifting
identity never your own.

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I Was Vicar of Large Things

I was vicar of large things in a small parish. Small-minded I will not say, there were depths in some of them I shrank back from, wells that the word “God”
Praise

I praise you because you are artist and scientist in one. When I am somewhat fearful of your power, your ability to work miracles
The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through to illuminate a small field for a while, and gone my way and forgotten it. But that was the… of great price, the one field that…
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The Other

There are nights that are so still that I can hear the small owl call… far off and a fox barking miles away. It is then that I lie in the lean hours awake listening
The Woman

So beautiful—God himself quailed at her approach: the long body cur… like the horizon. Why had he made her so? How would it be, she said, leaning towards him, if instead of
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,
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
Seated Peasant, by Paul Cézanne
A Peasant

Iago Prytherch his name, though,… Just an ordinary man of the bald… Who pens a few sheep in a gap of c… Docking mangels, chipping the gree… From the yellow bones with a half-…
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Threshold

I emerge from the mind’s cave into the worse darkness outside, where things pass and the Lord is in none of them. I have heard the still, small voic…
The Prisoner

‘Poems from prison! About what?’ ‘Life and God.’ ‘God in prison? Friend, you trifle with me. His face, perhaps,
Anniversary

Nineteen years now Under the same roof Eating our bread, Using the same air: Sighing, if one sighs,
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The Dark Well

They see you as they see you, A poor farmer with no name, Ploughing cloudward, sowing the wi… With squalls of gulls at the day’s… To me you are Prytherch, the man
Children’s Song

We live in our own world, A world that is too small For you to stoop and enter Even on hands and knees, The adult subterfuge.
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A Welshman to any Tourist

We’ve nothing vast to offer you, n… Except the waste of thought Forming from mind erosion; No canyons where the pterodactyl’s… Falls like a shadow.
Perspectives

Beasts rearing from green slime— an illiterate country, unable to r… its own name. Stones moved into po… on the hills’ sides; snakes laid t… in their cold shadow. The earth su…



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