to find God: no code
number, no address.
Technology stalls
without the material
we provide it. There must be
some other way. ‘Try
looking,’ says the eye,
‘Try listening’ the ear
answers. I stare into distance:
nothing but the gantries
where art is crucified in
the cause of new art.
I have heard amid uproar
in London the black redstart
singing among the ruins;
so I strain now amid
the times’ hubbub for fear
the still, small voice should
escape me. ‘Is he dumb?’
Wrong language. ‘Am I
impatient?’ I resort once
again to the word processor.
But where a poem in his honour
should emerge, all in bud
like a birch tree, there is only
the machine’s repetitions,
parallel tramlines of prose
never to come together in praise.
R.S. Thomas, Uncollected Poems (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books: 2013), p.172.
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