
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.
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.