Radiance, For Dylan Thomas

Radiance by Michael R. Burch for Dylan Thomas The poet delves earth’s detritus—hard toil— for raw-edged nouns, barbed verbs, vowels’ lush bouquet; each syllable his pen excretes—dense soil, dark images impacted, rooted clay. The poet sees the sea but feels its meaning— the teeming brine, the mirrored oval flame that leashes and excites its turgid surface... then squanders years imagining love’s the same. Belatedly he turns to what lies broken— the scarred and furrowed plot he fiercely sifts, among death’s sicksweet dungs and composts seeking one element that scorches and uplifts. The original title of this poem, which I still like, was “Elemental.” I have also considered “Elemental Radiance” from time to time. I think both “elemental” and “radiant” apply to Dylan Thomas’s best poems. Keywords/Tags: Dylan Thomas, poet, poetry, words, light, radiance, illumination, sea, moon, tides, love, metaphor, earth, roots, plot, pitchblende, uranium, delving, farming Downdraft by Michael R. Burch for Dylan Thomas We feel rather than understand what he meant as he reveals a shattered firmament which before him never existed. Here, there are no images gnarled and twisted out of too many words, but only flocks of white birds wheeling and flying. Here, as Time spins, reeling and dying, the voice of a last gull or perhaps some spirit no longer whole, echoes its lonely madrigal and we feel its strange pull on the astonished soul. O My Prodigal! The vents of the sky, ripped asunder, echo this wild, primal thunder— now dying into undulations of vanishing wings . . . and this voice which in haggard bleak rapture still somehow downward sings. These are poems about Dylan Thomas, as well as poems "for" and "after" Dylan Thomas. Dylan Thomas was one of my favorite poets from my early teens and has remained so over the years. I have written three poems ‘for’ him and one poem ‘after’ him: Myth by Michael R. Burch after the sprung rhythm of Dylan Thomas Here the recalcitrant wind sighs with grievance and remorse over fields of wayward gorse and thistle-throttled lanes. And she is the myth of the scythed wheat hewn and sighing, complete, waiting, lain in a low sheaf— full of faith, full of grief. Here the immaculate dawn requires belief of the leafed earth and she is the myth of the mown grain— golden and humble in all its weary worth. “Myth” won a Dylan Thomas poetry contest not too long ago. The judge was very complimentary of the poem. I believe I wrote the first version of this poem toward the end of my senior year of high school, around age 18, in late 1976. To my recollection this is my only poem influenced by the “sprung rhythm” of Dylan Thomas (moreso than that of Gerard Manley Hopkins). But I was not happy with the fourth line and put the poem aside for more than 20 years, until 1998, when I revised it. But I was still not happy with the fourth line, so I put it aside, then revised it again in 2020, nearly half a century after originally writing the poem! Sunset, at Laugharne by Michael R. Burch for Dylan Thomas At Laugharne, in his thirty-fifth year, he watched the starkeyed hawk career; he felt the vested heron bless, and larks and finches everywhere sank with the sun, their missives west— where faith is light; his nightjarred breast watched passion dovetail to its rest. * He watched the gulls above green shires flock shrieking, fleeing priested shores with silver fishes stilled on spears. He felt the pressing weight of years in ways he never had before— that gravity no brightness spares from sunken hills to unseen stars. He saw his father’s face in waves which gently lapped Wales’ gulled green bays. He wrote as passion swelled to rage— the dying light, the unturned page, the unburned soul’s devoured sage. * The words he gathered clung together till night—the jetted raven’s feather— fell, fell . . . and all was as before . . . till silence lapped Laugharne’s dark shore diminished, where his footsteps shone in pools of fading light—no more. In this poem, when I started listing the poets I like to read, Dylan Thomas was first: beMused by Michael R. Burch Perhaps at three you'll come to tea, to have a cuppa here? You'll just stop in to sip dry gin? I only have a beer. To name the "greats": Pope, Dryden, mates? The whole world knows their names. Discuss the "songs" of Emerson? But these are children's games. Give me rhythms wild as Dylan's! Give me Bobbie Burns! Give me Psalms, or Hopkins’ poems, Hart Crane’s, if he returns! Or Langston railing! Blake assailing! Few others I desire. Or go away, yes, leave today: your tepid poets tire. The American poet Thomas Rain Crowe lived in the Dylan Thomas boat house at Laugharne and wrote poems there. Mongrel Dreams (I) by Michael R. Burch These nights bring dreams of Cherokee shamans whose names are bright verbs and impacted dark nouns, whose memories are indictments of my pallid flesh . . . and I hear, as from a great distance, the cries tortured from their guileless lips, proclaiming the nature of my mutation. Mongrel Dreams (II) by Michael R. Burch for Thomas Rain Crowe I squat in my Cherokee lodge, this crude wooden hutch of dry branches and leaf-thatch as the embers smolder and burn, hearing always the distant tom-toms of your rain dance. I relax in my rustic shack on the heroned shores of Gwynedd, slandering the English in the amulet gleam of the North Atlantic, hearing your troubadour’s songs, remembering Dylan. I stand in my rough woolen kilt in the tall highland heather feeling the freezing winds through the trees leaning sideways, hearing your bagpipes’ lament, dreaming of Burns. I slave in my drab English hovel, tabulating rents while dreaming of Blake and burning your poems like incense. I abide in my pale mongrel flesh, writing in Nashville as the thunderbolts flash and the spring rains spill, till the quill gently bleeds and the white page fills, dreaming of Whitman, calling you brother.