RS Thomas,1940. Photo: Courtesy of the Church in Wales.
Luminary
'Luminary' by Jonathan Wooding
In memory of RS Thomas
You say the mystic, when she’s not a poet, fails
to mediate the – hang on –
mysterium tremendum et fascinans, (that’s God),
and then you riddle us with the immediacy
of the mystic Deus absconditus. So, God’s
absconded, and the mystic’s in that room
from which someone has suddenly
absented themselves. Is that it?
(It’s already the twenty-first century
and someone’s left the door open.)
For sure, I’m ready, for such auditory silence –
it’s all over your poems, after all.
You saw love, I hear, in a dark blaze.
I’m grateful to you, I remember
your autographing hand on
my copy of Ingrowing Thoughts
at a reading in 1986.
We stood in silence a moment,
not awkward, but you inflicted
on me something which is still
ingrowing. It’s not over, after all.
It’s there in that dew that awaits
your luminary’s footprints, and (I guess)
I’m ready not to set it all down, as you say,
ready for perpetual motion, and
wording God, just wording
or, at least, the just wording we hear
on the edgeland of absconding,
in evaporations of dew, and
ringing in silence, bringing
your ringless fingers within an inch
of that ingrowing thought
there in the creases
of my God! your God
