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Evans
by R. S. Thomas
Evans? Yes, many a time
I came down his bare flight
Of stairs into the gaunt kitchen
With its wood fire, where crickets sang
Accompaniment to the black kettle’s
Whine, and so into the cold
Dark to smother in the thick tide
Of night that drifted about the walls
Of his stark farm on the hill ridge.
It was not the dark filling my eyes
And mouth apalled me; not even the drip
Of rain like blood from the one tree
Weather-tortured. It was the dark
Silting the veins of that sick man
I left stranded upon the vast
And lonely shore of his bleak bed.
Miscellany
Other poems by R. S. Thomas
Being unwise enough to have married her
I never knew when she was not acting.
‘I love you’ she would say; I heard the audiences
Davies thought life was long;
there was a sameness in the song.
Pugh thought it all too brief,
Evans? Yes, many a time
I came down his bare flight
Of stairs into the gaunt kitchen
Men who have hardly uncurled
from their posture in the
womb. Naked. Heads bowed, not
Moments of great calm,
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
There was Dai Puw. He was no good.
They put him in the fields to dock swedes,
And took the knife from him, when he came home
Beasts rearing from green slime—
an illiterate country, unable to read
its own name. Stones moved into position
I want you to know how it was,
whether the Cross grinds into dust
under men’s wheels or shines brightly
The idiot goes round and around
With his brother in a bumping car
At the fair. The famous idiot
