Poeticous Logo
en
English Español Français Italiano
R. S. Thomas

R. S. Thomas

The Fair

The idiot goes round and around
With his brother in a bumping car
At the fair. The famous idiot
Smile hangs over the car’s edge,
Illuminating nothing. This is mankind
Being taken for a ride by a rich
Relation. The responses are fixed:
Bump, smile; bump, smile. And the current
 
Is generated by the smooth flow
Of the shillings. This is an orchestra
Of steel with the constant percussion
Of laughter. But where he should be laughing
Too, his features are split open, and look!
Out of the cracks come warm, human tears.

#WelshWriters

Other works by R. S. Thomas...
To a Young Poet

For the first twenty years you are… Bodily that is: as a poet, of cour… You are not born yet. It’s the ne… You cut your teeth on to emerge sm… For your brash courtship of the mu…
The Way of It

With her fingers she turns paint into flowers, with her body flowers into a remembrance of herself. She is at work always, mending the garment
Ninetieth Birthday

You go up the long track That will take a car, but is best… On slow foot, noting the lichen That writes history on the page Of the grey rock. Trees are about…
The Small Window

In Wales there are jewels To gather, but with the eye Only. A hill lights up Suddenly; a field trembles With colour and goes out
 1
 1
Song for Gwydion

When I was a child and the soft f… Quietly as snow on the bare bough… My father brought me trout from th… From whose chill lips the water so… Dull grew their eyes, the beautifu…
Caernarfon Castle, by Richard Wilson
Welsh History

We were a people taut for war; the… Were no harder, the thin grass Clothed them more warmly than the… Shirts our small bones. We fought, and were always in retr…
 1
Thirteen Blackbirds Looking at a Man

It is calm. It is as though we lived in a garden that had not yet arrived at the knowledge of
Evans

Evans? Yes, many a time I came down his bare flight Of stairs into the gaunt kitchen With its wood fire, where crickets… Accompaniment to the black kettle’…
Farm Wife

Hers is the clean apron, good for… Or lamp to embroider, as we talk s… In the long kitchen, while the whi… Turns to pastry in the great oven, Sweetly and surely as hay making
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 Absence

It is this great absence that is like a presence, that comp… me to address it without hope of a reply. It is a room I enter from which someone has just
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
On the Farm

There was Dai Puw. He was no goo… They put him in the fields to dock… And took the knife from him, when… At late evening with a grin Like the slash of a knife on his f…
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.
 6
 17
The Untamed

My garden is the wild Sea of the grass. Her garden Shelters between walls. The tide could break in; I should be sorry for this.



Top