Status Updates From Collected Poems

…This dies upon them, and they must die in darkness; die in the night and move to eternal fields of darkness. Foster the light, and God be with you.’

[letter between Trevor Hughes and Thomas, inspiration for “Foster the light” poem] Hughes’s reply concluded: ‘How shall a man die if he has never lived, or seen the beauty of the stars through the lenses of his own darkness? For so many God has never lived, the faint glimmer within them the glimmer of their own mean ego. ..

O ring of seas, nor sorrow as I shift

Standouts:
• Love in the Asylum (119)
• This Side of the Truth (116)
• Poem in October (115) — (required reading for turning 30)

“And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s
forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
through the parables
of sun light
and the legends of the green chapels
And the twice told field of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.”

Sadgirl summer in full swing!

Standouts:
• “The conversation of prayer”
• “Twenty-four years”
• “Oh no work of words”
• “The tombstone told when she died”

“Among men later I heard it said she cried her white-dressed limbs were bare and her red lips were kissed black, she wept in her pain and made mouths, talked and tore though her eyes smiled.” (102)

…Thomas affirms the unity of creation in the hope that, if we can live in harmony with the machinery, the spirit may be able to imbue our elemental impulses with creative purpose and make life meaningful.

How now my flesh, my naked fellow,
Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,
Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.

I blew the dreaming fellows to their bed
Where still they sleep unknowing of their ghost.

‘These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.’

I fled the Earth and, naked, climbed the weather,
Reaching a second ground far from the stars;
And there we wept, I and a ghostly other,
My mothers-eyed, upon the tops of trees;
I fled that ground as lightly as a feather.

I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain,
Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper’s eye,
Shifting to light, turned on me like a moon.

“And these poor nerves so wired to the skull
Ache on the lovelorn paper
I hug to love with my unruly scrawl
That utters all love hunger
And tells the page the empty ill.”
(- “My hero bares his nerves”)

Can never raise the midnight of a chuckle,