Hold Hard, These Ancient Minutes in the Cuckoo's Mouth
Hold Hard, These Ancient Minutes in the Cuckoo's Mouth
by Dylan Thomas
Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo's month,
Under the lank, fourth folly on Glamorgan's hill,
As the green blooms ride upward, to the drive of time;
Time, in a folly's rider, like a county man
Over the vault of ridings with his hound at heel,
Drives forth my men, my children, from the hanging south.
Country, your sport is summer, and December's pools
By crane and water-tower by the seedy trees
Lie this fifth month unstaked, and the birds have flown;
Holy hard, my country children in the world if tales,
The greenwood dying as the deer fall in their tracks,
The first and steepled season, to the summer's game.
And now the horns of England, in the sound of shape,
Summon your snowy horsemen, and the four-stringed hill,
Over the sea-gut loudening, sets a rock alive;
Hurdles and guns and railings, as the boulders heave,
Crack like a spring in vice, bone breaking April,
Spill the lank folly's hunter and the hard-held hope.
Down fall four padding weathers on the scarlet lands,
Stalking my children's faces with a tail of blood,
Time, in a rider rising, from the harnessed valley;
Hold hard, my country darlings, for a hawk descends,
Golden Glamorgan straightens, to the falling birds.
Your sport is summer as the spring runs angrily.
Miscellany
Other poems by Dylan Thomas (read randomly)
Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head …
A girl mad as birds
There once was a Square, such a square little Squar …
And he loved a trim Triangle;
But she was a flirt and around her skirt
My hero bares his nerves along my wrist
That rules form wrist to shoulder,
Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,
Now
Say nay,
Man dry man,
The sky is torn across
This ragged anniversary of two
Who moved for three years in tune
On no work of words now for three lean months in th …
bloody
Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body
Waking alone in a multitude of loves when morning's …
Surprised in the opening of her nightlong eyes
His golden yesterday asleep upon the iris
Once it was the colour of saying
Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill
With a capsized field where a school sat still
Our eunuch dreams, all seedless in the light,
Of light and love, the tempers of the heart,
Whack their boy’s limbs,
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Should lanterns shine, the holy face,
Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,
Would wither up, and any boy of love
