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‘Seventieth Birthday’ - #RSThomas (Between Here and Now, Macmillan) #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

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Seventieth Birthday.
Made of tissue and H20, and activated by cells
firing - Ah, heart, the legend of your person ! Did I invent it, and is it in being still?
In the competition with other women your victory is assured.
It is time, as Yeats said, is
the caterpillar in the cheek's rose, the untiring witherer of your petals.
You are drifting away from
me on the whitening current of your hair.
I lean far out from the bone's bough, knowing the hand I extend can save nothing of you but your love.

‘Aleph’ - #RSThomas (Between Here and Now, Macmillan) #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

‘Fair Day’ - #RSThomas (Between Here and Now, Macmillan) #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

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Fair Day.
They come in from the fields with the dew and the buttercup dust on their boots. It was not they nor their ancestors crucified Christ. They look up at what the town has done to him,
hanging his body in stone on a stone cross, as though to commemorate the bringing of the divine beast to bay and disabling him.
He is hung up high, but higher are the cranes and scaffolding of the future. And they stand by, men from the past, whose rôle is to assist in the destruction of the past, bringing their own beasts in to offer their blood up on a shoddier altar.
The town
is malignant. It grows, and what it feeds on is what these men call their home. Is there praise here? There is the noise of those buying and selling and mortgaging their conscience, while the stone eyes look down tearlessly. There is not even anger in them any more.

“Srebrenica, Town of Silver and Salt”

Detholiadau o'r gerdd hir gan y bardd o Gaerdydd, Abeer Ameer, sy wedi'i chyhoeddi yn rhifyn diweddaraf y New Welsh Review.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gZwOifDQNQ

#barddoniaeth #poetry

‘Correspondence’ - #RSThomas (Between Here and Now, Macmillan) #Gohebiaeth #Correspondence #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

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Correspondence.

You ask why I don't write.
But what is there to say?
The salt current swings in and out of the bay, as it has done time out of mind. How does that help?
It leaves illegible writing on the shore. If you were here, we would quarrel about it.
People file past this seascape as ignorantly as through a gallery of great art. I keep searching for meaning.
The waves are a moving staircase to climb, but in thought only.
The fall from the top is as sheer as ever. Younger I deemed truth was to come at beyond the horizon.
Older I stay still and am as far off as before. These nail-parings bore you? They explain my silence.
I wish there were as simple an explanation for the silence of God.

‘Threshold’ - #RSThomas (Between Here and Now, Macmillan) #Trothwy #Threshold #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

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Threshold.
I emerge from the mind's cave into the worse darkness outside, where things pass and the Lord is in none of them.
I have heard the still, small voice and it was that of the bacteria demolishing my cosmos. I have lingered too long on
this threshold, but where can I go?
To look back is to lose the soul I was leading upwards towards the light. To look forward? Ah,
what balance is needed at the edges of such an abyss.
I am alone on the surface of a turning planet. What
to do but, like Michelangelo's Adam, put my hand out into unknown space, hoping for the reciprocating touch?

RS Thomas

‘Return’ - #RSThomas (Between Here and Now, #Dychwelyd #Return #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

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RETURN.
Taking the next train
to the city, yet always returning to his place on a bridge over a river, throbbing
with trout, whose widening circles are the mandala
for contentment. So will a poet return to the work laid
on one side and abandoned for the voices summoning him to the wrong tasks. Art is not life. It is not the river
carrying us away, but the motionless image of itself on a fast-running surface with which life tries constantly to keep up.

‘Patterns’ - #RSThomas (Between Here and Now, Macmillan) #Patrymau #Patterns #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

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PATTERNS.
The old men ask
for more time, while the young waste it. And the philosopher smiles, knowing there is none
there. But the hero stands sword drawn at the looking-glass of his mind, aiming at that anonymous face over his shoulder.

‘After Jericho’ - #RSThomas (Frequencies, Macmillan) #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

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After Jericho.
There is an aggression of fact to be resisted successfully only in verse, that fights language with its own tools. Smile, poet,
among the ruins of a vocabulary you blew your trumpet against.
It was a conscript army; your words, every one of them, are volunteers.

Criw da o bobl yn mwynhau "Rhedeg rhwng dau draig" - noson o gerddi a chaneuon Gaeleg a Chymraeg - yn yr Alecs yng Nghaernarfon neithiwr. Cofiwch bydd "Rhedeg rhwng y ddau ddraig" yn Yr Albion, Conwy, am 19:30, Nos Fercher, 12 Mawrth. Mynediad am ddim!! #conwy #YrAlbion #barddoniaeth #cymraeg #gogleddcymru #caneuon #gaeleg

Bydd tîm Crannog (tîm fy nghymar) ar y Talwrn heno, yn erbyn tîm “newydd" Caerelli

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0028stl

#barddoniaeth #RadioCymru

"Rhedeg rhwng dau draig" - noson o gerddi a chaneuon Gaeleg a Chymraeg yn nhafarn Yr Albion, Conwy, 19:30, Nos Fercher, 12 Mawrth. Mynediad am ddim!! #conwy #barddoniaeth #gaeleg #cymraeg https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X8l5VRLBCcLPq4rhP4sv9zXH2s6rVIxz/view?usp=drivesdk

Dwi newydd wylio "Hedd Wyn". Mae'n ffilm drist iawn, ond wych. Dwi'n mor ddig at gymaint o fywydau wedi gwastraffu. Mae'r byd angen mwy o feirdd a lai o filwyr.

https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-hedd-wyn-1992-online

#barddoniaeth #HeddWyn #Ffilm #Cymraeg

‘Two’ - #RSThomas (The Way of It, Ceolfrith Press) #Dau #Two #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

Text of poem -

Two.
So you have to think of the bone hearth where love was kindled, of the size
of the shadows so small a flame threw on the world's walls, with the heavens
over them, lighting their vaster fires to no end. He took her hand sometimes and felt the will to be of the poetry he could not write. She measured him with her moist eye for the coat always too big. And time, the faceless collector of taxes, beat on their thin door, and they opened to him, looking beyond him, beyond the sediment of his myriad demands to the bright place, where their undaunted spirits were already walking.

‘Festival’ - #RSThomas (Residues, @BloodaxeBooks) #Gŵyl #Festival #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

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Festival.
This Christmas before an altar of gold the holly will remind us how love bleeds,
the mistletoe remind how pale and puny the knuckles of the few fingers clenched upon faith.

‘Christmas’ - #RSThomas (Not That He Brought Flowers - Rupert Hart-Davis) #Nadolig #Christmas #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

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Christmas.
There is a morning;
Time brings it nearer,
Brittle with frost
And starlight. The owls sing In the parishes. The people rise And walk to the churches' Stone lanterns, there to kneel And eat the new bread Of love, washing it down With the sharp taste Of blood they will shed.
- RS Thomas

‘Blind Noel’ - #RSThomas (No Truce with the Furies, @BloodaxeBooks) #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

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Blind Noel.
Christmas; the themes are exhausted.
Yet there is always room on the heart for another snowflake to reveal a pattern.
Love knocks with such frosted fingers.
I look out. In the shadow of so vast a God I shiver, unable to detect the child for the whiteness.

‘Luminary’ - #RSThomas (Uncollected Poems, @BloodaxeBooks) #Goleuaethwr #Luminary #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

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Luminary.
My luminary,
my morning and evening star. My light at noon when there is no sun and the sky lowers. My balance of joy in a world that has gone off joy's standard. Yours the face that young I recognised as though I had known you of old. Come, my eyes said, out into the morning of a world whose dew waits for your footprint.
Before a green altar with the thrush for priest I took those gossamer vows that neither the Church could stale nor the Machine tarnish, that with the years have grown hard as flint, lighter than platinum on our ringless fingers.

‘The View from the Window’ - #RSThomas (Poetry for Supper, Rupert Hart-Davis) #Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd #Poet #Poetry #Poem

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The View from the Window.
Like a painting it is set before one, But less brittle, ageless; these colours Are renewed daily with variations Of light and distance that no painter Achieves or suggests. Then there is movement, Change, as slowly the cloud bruises Are healed by sunlight, or snow caps A black mood; but gold at evening To cheer the heart. All through history
The great brush has not rested, Nor the paint dried; yet what eye, Looking coolly, or, as we now, Through the tears' lenses, ever saw This work and it was not finished?

Although this account is paused on here, it’s now active in a different place where the sky is always blue. Perhaps take a look at https://bsky.app/profile/rsthomaspoet.bsky.social ? 😊
#RSThomas
#Bardd #Barddoniaeth #Cerdd
#Poet #Poetry #Poem

#Barddoniaeth

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