Ronald Stuart Thomas

The Absence

It is this great absencethat is like a presence, that compelsme to address it without hopeof a reply. It is a room I enterfrom which someone has justgone, the vestibule for the arrivalof one who has not yet come.I modernise the anachronismof my language, but he is no more herethan before. Genes and moleculeshave no…

‘Listen, now, verse should be as natural

And grows slowly from obtuse soilTo the white flower of immortal beauty.’‘Natural, hell! What was it ChaucerSaid once about the long toilThat goes like blood to the poem’s making?Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,Limp as bindweed, if it break at allLife’s iron crust. Man, you must sweatAnd rhyme your guts taut, if you’d…

Looking upon this tree with its quaint pretension

Or marking the texture of its living bark,A grey sea wrinkled by the winds of years,I understand whence this man’s body comes,In veins and fibres, the bare boughs of bone,The trellised thicket, where the heart, that robin,Greets with a song the seasons of the blood.But where in meadow or mountain shall I matchThe individual accent…