Vision And Prayer

by Dylan Thomas

Clown In The Moon 

My tears are like the quiet drift

Of petals from some magic rose;

And all my grief flows from the rift

Of unremembered skies and snows.

I think, that if I touched the earth,

It would crumble;

It is so sad and beautiful,

So tremulously like a dream. 

Vision And Prayer

Who

Are you

Who is born

In the next room

So loud to my own

That I can hear the womb

Opening and the dark run

Over the ghost and the dropped son

Behind the wall thin as a wren's bone?

In the birth bloody room unknown

To the burn and turn of time

And the heart print of man

Bows no baptism

But dark alone

Blessing on

The wild

Child. 

Lament 

When I was a windy boy and a bit

And the black spit of the chapel fold,

(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),

I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,

The rude owl cried like a tell-tale tit,

I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled

Nine-pin down on donkey's common,

And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed

Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,

The whole of the moon I could love and leave

All the green leaved little weddings' wives

In the coal black bush and let them grieve.

When I was a gusty man and a half

And the black beast of the beetles' pews

(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of bitches),

Not a boy and a bit in the wick-

Dipping moon and drunk as a new dropped calf,

I whistled all night in the twisted flues,

Midwives grew in the midnight ditches,

And the sizzling sheets of the town cried, Quick!-

Whenever I dove in a breast high shoal,

Wherever I ramped in the clover quilts,

Whatsoever I did in the coal-

Black night, I left my quivering prints.

When I was a man you could call a man

And the black cross of the holy house,

(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of welcome),

Brandy and ripe in my bright, bass prime,

No springtailed tom in the red hot town

With every simmering woman his mouse

But a hillocky bull in the swelter

Of summer come in his great good time

To the sultry, biding herds, I said,

Oh, time enough when the blood runs cold,

And I lie down but to sleep in bed,

For my sulking, skulking, coal black soul!

When I was half the man I was

And serve me right as the preachers warn,

(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of downfall),

No flailing calf or cat in a flame

Or hickory bull in milky grass

But a black sheep with a crumpled horn,

At last the soul from its foul mousehole

Slunk pouting out when the limp time came;

And I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye,

Gristle and rind, and a roarers' life,

And I shoved it into the coal black sky

To find a woman's soul for a wife.

Now I am a man no more no more

And a black reward for a roaring life,

(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of strangers),

Tidy and cursed in my dove cooed room

I lie down thin and hear the good bells jaw--

For, oh, my soul found a sunday wife

In the coal black sky and she bore angels!

Harpies around me out of her womb!

Chastity prays for me, piety sings,

Innocence sweetens my last black breath,

Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,

And all the deadly virtues plague my death!