R
S Thomas 1913 - 2000
RS
His death
on the midnight news.
Suddenly colder.
Gold September's driven off
by something afoot
in the south-west approaches.
God's breathing in space out there
misting the heave of the seas
dark and empty tonight,
except for the one frail coracle
borne out to sea,
burning.
Gillian
Clarke
In Memoriam,
R. S. Thomas
The bell has
tolled.
We are diminished.
It was not announced on the nine-o'clock news.
In Pentrefelin,
Twll-y-Cae remains, its thick walls sheltering,
its Welsh oak furniture secure as history,
and outside the gate, two new metal dust-bins.
Dafydd-y-Garreg
Wen lies nearby,
his song fastened to a hill over Borth-y-Gest.
My poet ancestor lies under Italian marble
marking the hitting and lilt of Port's once schoonered quay.
Here, in our
parish, this man
had turned a sentence to such beauty on the page.
God gave him
his style and he followed it
as one of the faithful
fluently through his pen.
He came in
to the dining-room
and when he entered, we all stood up,
Emyr Humphreys, Kyffin Willliams, Matthew and I.
He handed out
biscuits and talked with Emyr and Kyffin
of the lanes of Arfon and Môn,
the stones, trees, birds, backwaters, quiet churches.
He brought
us to the door as we left,
his eyes and voice bright with humour,
mocking some absurd manner.
He was brave.
He had hooked his face to the contraries,
placing his body in the wind and by the crooked trees
in man's mistrust and nature's non-forgiving.
As we left,
he pointed to my car's name.
"Accord," he said. "That's a good name".
John Idris
Jones
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