Poem by R.S. Thomas

Thomas was a great poet of the second half of the 20th Century. I mean one of the great poets. Welsh (thus the Anglo-spellings), an Anglican priest, often he wrote as if to reconcile his despair at the silence of God with his faith. He wrote about, and universalized, marriage, Welsh nationalism and what he referred to as "the machine," by which I think he meant a coldly engineered future that is slowly crowding out the influence of the human soul. Some of his greatest work was done in and about old age. This one, ostensibly about traveling, I came upon while traveling myself.

Somewhere

Something to bring back to show

you have been there: a lock of God's

hair, stolen from him while he was

asleep; a photograph of the garden

of the spirit. As has been said,

the point of travelling is not

to arrive, but to return home

laden with pollen you shall work up

into the honey the mind feeds on.

What are our lives but harbours

we are continually setting out

from, airports at which we touch

down and remain in too briefly

to recognise what it is they remind

us of? And always in one

another we seek the proof

of experiences it would be worthy dying for.

Surely there is a shirt of fire

this one wore, that is hung up now

like some rare fleece in the hall of heroes?

Surely these husbands and wives

have dipped their marriages in a fast

spring? Surely there exists somewhere,

as the justification for our looking for it,

the one light that can cast such shadows.

R.S. elsewhere on the blog: "Song at the Year's Turning"