On the Farm

By R. S. Thomas

There was Dai Puw. He was no good.

They put him in the fields to dock swedes,

And took the knife from him, when he came home

At late evening with a grin

Like the slash of a knife on his face.

There was Llew Puw, and he was no good.

Every evening after the ploughing

With the big tractor he would sit in his chair,

And stare into the tangled fire garden,

Opening his slow lips like a snail.

There was Huw Puw, too. What shall I say?

I have heard him whistling in the hedges

On and on, as though winter

Would never again leave those fields,

And all the trees were deformed.

And lastly there was the girl;

Beauty under some spell of the beast.

Her pale face was the lantern

By which they read in life’s dark book

The shrill sentence: God is love.

Copyright Credit: R. S. Thomas, “On the Farm” from The Poems of R. S. Thomas. Copyright © 2001 by Kunjana Jaikin. Reprinted by permission of Kunjana Jaikin.

Source: The Poems of R. S. Thomas (1985)