R S Thomas and the fragrance of God.

Just
to balance yesterday's quick overview of R S Thomas's poems in which I
made quite a lot of his angularity, impatience with too easily won
certainty, and his rigorous questioning of religion as mere comfort.
There are times when RST wrote with a wistfulness and imaginative
kindness about human longing and the elusiveness of God whose presence
haunts us in each encounter with beauty, transient and fragile.

The Flower

I asked for riches.

You gave me the earth, the sea,

                                  the immensity

of the broad sky. I looked at them

and learned I must withdraw

           to possess them. I gave my eyes

           and my ears, and dwelt

in a soundless darkness

                                 in the shadow

           of your regard.

                                 The soul

           grew in me, filling me

with its fragrance.

                          Men came

to me from the four

          winds to hear me speak

          of the unseen flower by which

I sat, whose roots were not

in the soil, nor its petals the colour

of the wild sea; that was

         its own species with its own

         sky over it, shot

with the rainbow of your coming and going.

R S Thomas, Collected Poems, 1945-1990, (London: Dent, 1993), 280

(The photo was taken at the People's Palace on Glasgow Green – a Hibiscus in full but brief bloom).