I had intended posting these updates in bookcrossing, but it makes it hard for me to find them again!

Read the following from the collected poems of R S Thomas:
 
2 January
Welsh Landscape
Soil
The One Furrow
Children's Song
The Village

3 January
Song at the Year's Turning
Invasion on the Farm
Taliesin 1952
January
Pisces
The Return

This is the one I feel like sharing today:

Taliesin 1952

I have been all men known to history,
Wondering at the world and at time passing;
I have seen evil, and the light blessing
Innocent love under a spring sky.

I have been Merlin wandering in the woods
Of a far country, where the winds waken
Unnatural voices, my mind broken
By a sudden acquaintance with man's rage.

I have been Glyn Dwr set in the vast night,
Scanning the stars for the propitious omen,
A leader of men, yet cursed by the crazed women
Mourning their dead under the same stars.

I have been Goronwy, forced from my own land
To taste the bitterness of the salt ocean;
I have known exile and a wild passion
Of longing changing to a cold ache.

King, beggar and fool, I have been all by turns,
Knowing the body's sweetness, the mind's treason;
Taliesin still, I show you a new world, risen,
Stubborn with beauty, out of the heart's need.