Poem

By Dylan Thomas

Her tombstone told when she died.

Her two surnames stopped me still.

A virgin married at rest.

She married in this pouring place,

That I struck one day by luck,

Before I heard in my mother's side

Or saw in the looking-glass shell

The rain through her cold heart speak

And the sun killed in her face.

More the thick stone cannot tell.

Before she lay in a stranger's bed

With a hand plunged through her hair,

Or that rainy tongue beat back

Through the devilish years and innocent deaths

To the room of a secret child,

Among men later I heard it said

She cried her white-dressed limbs were bare

And her red lips were kissed black,

She wept in her pain and made mouths,

Talked and tore though her eyes smiled.

I who saw in a winding film

Death and this mad heroine

Meet once on a mortal wall

Heard her speak through the chipped beak

Of the stone bird guarding her:

I died before bedtime came

But my womb was bellowing

And I felt with my bare fall

A blazing red harsh head tear up

And the dear floods of his hair.

Copyright Credit: Dylan Thomas, “Poem” from Poetry vol. 55, no. 2 (November 1939): 66-67.

Source: Poetry (November 1939)