Thursday, July 28, 2005

... by R.S. Thomas ...

It is a crackling of song's twigs,
but dry like the brittle
but bitter laughter of a young girl
at a tart joke; the scratching
of a match on a bare hearth,
an attempt to get April going
before February has departed.
It is a symbol of our condition,
a species parochial and important,
erecting oru small edifices
in the context of space-time,
domesticating the wilderness
that geology has bequeathed us.
Its nest is a twigged hovel,
illuminated by jewels.
Those blue caskets exhibit, when opened,
the contents that are their programme.
Their phrases, such as they are,
were not listened to by emperor or clown.
It is free will that is our problem.
In the absence of such wings
as were denied us we insist
on inheriting others from the machine.
The eggs that we incubate bring forth
in addition to saints monsters.
the featherless brood whose one thing
in common with dunnocks is
that they do not migrate . We are fascinated
by evil; almost you could say
it is the plumage we acquire
by natural selection. There is a contradiction
here. Generally subdued feathers
in birds are compensated for
by luxuriant song. Not so these
whose frayed notes go with their plain clothes.
It is we who, gaudy as jays,
make cacophonous music under an egg-shell sky.


stomached it at
9:05 PM