Mrs Calloway’s Reviews > [(The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas)] [ By (author) Dylan Thomas, Edited by John Goodby ] [October, 2014] > Status Update

You who bow down at cross and altar,
Remember me and pity Him
Who took my flesh and bone for armour
And double crossed my mother’s womb.

I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither
A ghost nor man, but mortal ghost.
And I was struck down by death’s feather.

And time cast forth my mortal creature
To drift or drown upon the seas
Acquainted with the salt adventure
Of tides that never touched the shores.
I who was rich was made the richer
By sipping at the vine of days.

My throat knew thirst before the structure
Of skin and vein around the well
Where words and water make a mixture
Unfailing till the blood runs foul;
My heart knew love, my belly hunger;
I smelt the maggot in my stool.

And flesh was snipped to cross the lines
Of gallow crosses on the liver
And brambles in the wringing brains.

Before I knocked and flesh let enter,
With liquid hands tapped on the womb,
I who was as shapeless as the water
That shaped the Jordan near my home

And rock twin floods upon their starry laps,

Let for one moment a faith statement
See the first living light,
And your maieutic slumber drag it forth.
(maieutic = obstretic; sleep is regarded as the midwife of faith.)

The child tells, when the trembling cord is cut,
Gods shall be gods, and many deaths be death.

A goose’s quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.