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

This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of the central root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunge in its fruit;
Man in the day or wind at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grapes joy.

The brains of death undid the knot
Before the blood and flame were twined
In love’s last collar.

Night in the sockets round,
Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;

[letter] I realise that it is impossible for me to raise myself to the altitude of the stars, and that i am forced, therefore, to bring down the stars to my own level and to incorporate them into my own physical universe.

When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,

Dawn breaks behind the eyes

Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghost with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

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.