Comment on Dylan Thomas

On a poem by Dylan Thomas

Your refusal to mourn

so brave

but callous beyond Schopenhauer

and the way you both lived

brings hypocrisy

to my water

I cast my staff after you

great giants of words and literature

but how self centred we all are

is that what I’m to learn

out here

alone as a Cartesian subject

and we have abandoned such thoughts

or we thought we had

now even science is snared in conscience

and consciousness is where

their work belongs

the inner sense the qualia

I know what it means to be a bat

I have been volcanoes

I have been fields of barley in gold

I have been at one with mountains

I have stripped branches out of their wood

found their plascticity wanting

how can you not mourn

every sunrise each dawn

can’t you feel them screaming

you ran to the bottle I know

there is something

you aren’t telling