Dylan Thomas — A Close & Holy Darkness

Santa At Holidazzle – 178/365, Archive 365, Droid Shots, December 2012, Downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, photo © 2012 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

Christmas Day. Presents opened, eggnog half gone, phone calls East and West. Longing, joy, gratitude, loss. What to leave behind, what to keep. Emptiness. Love.

Reading Dylan Thomas aloud, Christmas Eve. The moon-buried sky over a village churchyard in Laugharne. The close and holy darkness must have haunted him. A child’s sugarplum dreams—tufted hooves flick mediæval snow off the rooftop Castle of Abercorran.

Waiting for Santa—
the frigid windless night
soothes and comforts me.

Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept. –Dylan Thomas, A Child’s Christmas in Wales

Laugharne is a town in Carmarthenshire, Wales on the estuary of the River Tâf, and home to Dylan Thomas from 1949 until his death in 1953. Thought to have been an inspiration for the fictional town of Llareggub in Under Milk Wood, the Township was originally known as Abercorran. The name was changed to Laugharne after the English Civil War.

-posted on red Ravine, Tuesday, December 25th, 2012

Read Full Post »

Poetry: Garden

By 94stranger

Garden

It is not I the first to say

each soul is like a garden;

each death a garden

where we may no longer walk.

My garden has its walls; a hidden door

beneath the ivy, where the passer-by

would hardly look.

Inside is grass and sweetly- flowering shrubs,

a fountain and a small pavilion too.

You will not find the master

of the garden there,

on silk embroidered cushions sipping tea;

no-one in residence you’ll find

except an old man in a battered hat

composting autumn leaves.

About writing, 94stranger says: I’ve been writing poetry since I was a teenager. My career as a poet got knocked on the head at a very tender age, when I came into contact with the poetry of Dylan Thomas. Pieces such as Fern Hill were the kind of thing I would have desired to write, yet I felt that they could not possibly be bettered. At that point, I ceased to have any ambition to be a Poet.

I guess it’s taken me most of the rest of my adult life to reach the point where I feel that perhaps I have my own voice, and that in any case what others feel about what I write is not a life and death issue! I care about what I feel about it, but that’s not quite the same.

Writing poetry has been a very occasional and episodic thing with me over the years – I have more than once gone several years without writing a line. Actually, I’ve written more poetry in my three months blogging than I probably had in the previous three decades.

Essentially, I write when I am moved –- I don’t feel any obligation to try to write, because my self-image does not include that of being a professional writer in any sense.

I have my obsession with Rainring (for which I am serialising the story I wrote for the illustrators of the cards on the 20th of every month under the rubric “Tales from Rainring”) and one obsession is enough for anybody! I blog under the pseudonym of 94stranger because The Stranger is the Rainring card that represents my personal type.

This poem is a reflection of how I feel about myself. I was, incidentally, a professional gardener for many years. I think of my work these days as gardening in the psyche. The only other thing to say about this specific poem is that it hasn’t yet been matured, so I don’t know if it’s in the final form. The only way to find that out is to leave it for a year or two and then go back and take a long cold look at it. “Write in heat, revise cold” would be my motto for poetry writing, I reckon.

Read Full Post »