Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kier.

Today's poem is by a Welsh poet and an Anglican priest named Ronald Stewart Thomas, also known as

R.S. Thomas. He lived from 1913 to 2000. My friend Sarah Jane Bentley, who some of you may have

heard on some of our podcast recently,

was telling me about this poem. She sent it to me. Once I saw it, I remembered reading it in college,

but I hadn't read it closely since then. And so I'm really glad that she sent it. And unfortunately, I have no ability to read it in a true Welsh accent. So I apologize for that. Hopefully I can do it a little bit of justice, though. Maybe one day I'll have her on to read it in the appropriate accent.

But I wanted to share this poem with you.

It's quite mysterious and haunting, and it's really worth sharing on this podcast.

It's called Welsh Landscape, and this is how it goes.

To live in Wales is to be conscious at dusk of the spilled blood that went into the making of the wild sky,

dying the immaculate rivers and all their courses.

It is to be aware, above the noisy tractor and hum of the machine,

of strife in the strung woods, vibrant with sped arrows.

You cannot live in the present, at least not in Wales.

There is a language, for instance, the soft continents strange to the ear.

There are cries in the dark at night, as owls answer the moon, and thick ambush of shadows hushed in the fields' corners.

There is no present in whales and no future.

There is only the past, brittle with relics, wind-bitten towers and castles with sham, ghosts,

moldering quarries and mines, and an impotent people, sick with inbreeding, worrying the carcass of an old song.

So, boy, is that a melancholy poem? But it's haunting, you know, there's all these images of

kind of hauntedness, ghostliness, you know, mystery. I just did a little bit of a Google search on it to see what people were saying about it

and to see what its reputation is.

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