Radiance, for Dylan Thomas

for Dylan Thomas

The poet delves earth’s detritus―hard toil―

for raw-edged nouns, barbed verbs, vowels’ lush bouquet;
each syllable his pen excretes―dense soil,

dark images impacted, rooted clay.

The poet sees the sea but feels its meaning―
the teeming brine, the mirrored oval flame
that leashes and excites its turgid surface ...
then squanders years imagining love’s the same.

Belatedly he turns to what lies broken―
the scarred and furrowed plot he fiercely sifts,
among death’s sicksweet dungs and composts seeking
one element that scorches and uplifts.

The original title of this poem, which I still like, was “Elemental.” I have also considered “Elemental Radiance” from time to time. I think both “elemental” and “radiant” apply to Dylan Thomas’s best poems. Keywords/Tags: Dylan Thomas, poet, poetry, words, light, radiance, illumination, sea, moon, tides, love, metaphor, earth, roots, plot, pitchblende, uranium, delving, farming

Downdraft

by Michael R. Burch

for Dylan Thomas

We feel rather than understand what he meant

as he reveals a shattered firmament

which before him never existed.

Here, there are no images gnarled and twisted

out of too many words,

but only flocks of white birds

wheeling and flying.

Here, as Time spins, reeling and dying,

the voice of a last gull

or perhaps some spirit no longer whole,

echoes its lonely madrigal

and we feel its strange pull

on the astonished soul.

O My Prodigal!

The vents of the sky, ripped asunder,

echo this wild, primal thunder,

now dying into undulations of vanishing wings . . .

and this voice which in haggard bleak rapture still somehow downward sings.

Sunset, at Laugharne

by Michael R. Burch

for Dylan Thomas

At Laugharne, in his thirty-fifth year,

he watched the starkeyed hawk career;

he felt the vested heron bless,

and larks and finches everywhere

sank with the sun, their missives west�"

where faith is light; his nightjarred breast

watched passion dovetail to its rest.

He watched the gulls above green shires

flock shrieking, fleeing priested shores

with silver fishes stilled on spears.

He felt the pressing weight of years

in ways he never had before�"

that gravity no brightness spares

from sunken hills to unseen stars.

He saw his father’s face in waves

which gently lapped Wales’ gulled green bays.

He wrote as passion swelled to rage�"

the dying light, the unturned page,

the unburned soul’s devoured sage.

The words he gathered clung together

till night�"the jetted raven’s feather�"

fell, fell . . . and all was as before . . .

till silence lapped Laugharne’s dark shore

diminished, where his footsteps shone

in pools of fading light�"no more.

Keywords/Tags: Dylan Thomas, Laugharne, Wales, ocean, sea, seaside, beach, bays, waves, ocean waves, birds, hawk, herons, gulls, father, poet, poetry, poem, poems, famous poets, elegy