When six people e-mail asking why we've overlooked Dylan Thomas, it's time to note him. The Anne Sexton poetry cutting resulted in 48 positive e-mails and 7 negative ones. Most of the e-mails, even the negative ones, noted how necessary it was to spotlight poetry.
We agree and since Dylan Thomas was requested ("he's anti-war!" three of you wrote), we make his work the focus of this poetry cutting.
Myselves
The grievers
Grieve
Among the street burned to tireless death
A child of a few hours
With its kneading mouth
Charred on the black breast of the grave
The mother dug, and its arm full of fires.
("Ceremony After a Fire Raid.")
When the morning was waking over the war
He put on his clothes and stepped out and he died,
The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide,
He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stone
And the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor.
("Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid Was a Man Aged a Hundred")
After such fighting as the weakest know,
There's more than dying;
Lose the great pains or stuff the wound,
He'll ache too long
Through no regret of leaving woman waiting
For her soldier stained with split words
That spill such acrid blood.
("Out of the sighs")
The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.
. . .
The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor stroke the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.
("The hand that signed the paper.")
I make a weapon of an ass's skeleton
And walk the warring sands by the dead town,
Cudgel great air, wreck east, and topple sundown,
Storm her sped heart, hang with beheaded veins
Its wringing shell, and let her eyelids fasten.
Destruction, picked by birds, brays through the jaw-bone,
And, for that murder's sake, dark with contagion
Like an approaching wave I sprawl to ruin.
("I make this in a warring absence")
Too proud to die; broken and blind he died
The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride.
("Elegy.")
I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither
A ghost nor a man, but mortal ghost.
And I was struck down by death's feather.
I was a mortal to the last
Long breath that carried to my father
The message of his dying christ.
("Before I knocked.")
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
("And death shall have no dominion.")