Boris Pavlikovsky / Pexels

January

The fox drags its wounded belly

Over the snow, the crimson seeds

Of blood burst with a mild explosion,

Soft as excrement, bold as roses.

Over the snow that feels no pity,

Whose white hands can give no healing,

The fox drags its wounded belly.

Song at the Year’s Turning

Shelley dreamed it. Now the dream decays.

The props crumble; the familiar ways

Are stale with tears trodden underfoot.

The heart’s flower withers at the root.

Bury it then, in history’s sterile dust.

The slow years shall tame your tawny lust.

Love deceived him; what is there to say

The mind brought you by a better way

To this despair? Lost in the world’s wood

You cannot stanch the bright menstrual blood.

The earth sickens; under naked boughs

The frost comes to barb your broken vows.

Is there blessing? Light’s peculiar grace

In cold splendour robes this tortured place

For strange marriage. Voices in the wind

Weave a garland where a mortal sinned.

Winter rots you; who is there to blame?

The new grass shall purge you in its flame.

Epiphany

Three kings? Not even one

any more. Royalty

has gone to ground, its journeyings

over. Who now will bring

gifts and to what place? In

the manger there are only the toys

and the tinsel. The child

has become a man. Far

off from his cross in the wrong

season he sits at table

with us with on his head

the fool’s cap of our paper money.

R.S. Thomas

R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) was a Welsh poet and Anglican priest whose poems celebrated Welsh nationalism, decried modern technology as a temptation for man to reject his spiritual nature, and condemned the anglicization of Wales and Welsh culture. Many of his later poems were more overtly metaphysical, exploring the nature and challenges of belief in God and man’s relationship with the divine. In 1996, he was nominated for but did not win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his admirers was the Nobel Laureate of the previous year, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who read some of Thomas’s poems at a memorial event at Westminster Abbey after Thomas’s death.