Cain's Murder of Abel

Cain

Abel looked at the wound
His brother had dealt him, and love him
For it. Cain saw that look
And struck him again. The blood cried
On the ground; God listened to it.
He questioned Cain. But Cain answered:
Who made the blood? I offered you
Clean things: the blond hair
Of the corn; the knuckled vegetables; the
Flowers; things that did not publish
Their hurst, that bled
Silently. You would not accept them.

And God said: It was part of myself
He gave me. The lamb was torn
From my own side. The limp head,
The slow fall of red tears—they
Were like a mirror to me in which I beheld
My reflection. I anointed myself
In readiness for the journey
To the doomed tree you were at work upon.


--R.S. Thomas
From R.S. Thomas, Poems of R.S. Thomas (Fayetteville, AR: U of Arkansas, 1984), pp. 74-5.

Related reading:  R.S. Thomas' poem Poetry for Supper

"Build your verse a ladder"

Poetry for Supper



'Listen, now, verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty.'


'Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem's making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life's iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build
Your verse a ladder.'


'You speak as though
No sunlight ever surprised the mind
Groping on its cloudy path.'


'Sunlight's a thing that needs a window
Before it enters a dark room.
Windows don't happen.'


So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran
Noisily by them, glib with prose.


-- R. S. Thomas

Poetry for Supper?

Poetry for Supper
R.S. Thomas

'Listen, now, verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower
of immortal beauty.'

'Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem's making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life's iron crust.
Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build
Your verse a ladder.'
'You speak as though
No sunlight ever surprised the mind
Groping on its cloudy path.'

'Sunlight's a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don't happen.'
So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran
Noisily by them, glib with prose.

Another R.S. Thomas Poem

A Blackbird Singing
R.S. Thomas

It seems wrong that out of this bird,
Black, bold, a suggestion of dark
Places about it, there yet should come
Such rich music, as though the notes'
Ore were changed to a rare metal
At one touch of that bright bill.

You have heard it often, alone at your desk
In a green April, your mind drawn
Away from its work by sweet disturbance
Of the mild evening outside your room.

A slow singer, but loading each phrase
With history's overtones, love, joy
And grief learned by his dark tribe
In other orchards and passed on
Instinctively as they are now,
But fresh always with new tears.

A Poem by R.S. Thomas

The following poem was penned by the late Welsh poet and Anglican priest, R.S. Thomas (1913-2000).

One Life

Growing up
is to leave the fireside
with its tales,
the burying of the head
between God’s knees.
It is to perceive
that knowledge of him comes
from the genes’ breaking
of an involved code,
from the mind’s parallel
at-homeness with missile and scalpel.

Literature is on the way
out. The still, small voice
is that of Orpheus looking
over his shoulder at a dream
fading. At the mouth
of the cave is the machine’s
whirlwind, hurrying the new
arts in, advancing the threshold
of our permitted exposure to
its becquerels and decibels.

From Collected Later Poems 1988-2000.