the deepening ground

Coming up to breathe at the start of a new semester is essential. Coming to The Deepening Ground to share those limited breaths, however, feels impossible. Just staying a day ahead of your students in the course material while being present in each moment for the necessary interactions, the life-giving exchanges of human-to-human, while carrying the weight of the past can be nearly suffocating. So my breaths have been few, primarily drawn from the pages of the poets I love to read in the fading minutes of each day, or those rare occasions, like last Sunday’s quarterly gathering of a handful of fellow poets masquerading in life’s more acceptable professions, where we feel most alive and understood by souls who share a love for the literary and a desire to listen.

Here, then, I present one of the many gems I’m discovering in a collection of poems by R. S. Thomas that I ordered from England. My exposure to Thomas had been limited to “Other,” shared by Paul Kingsnorth in his book Against the Machine. Though Thomas died in 2000, he is a poet for our times. According to the back of the book, “In language of great strength, simplicity and beauty, R. S. Thomas explores his characteristic, often prophetic themes: technology and our use of it to destroy nature and rural life; the search for the self and for meaning, the quest for and dialogue with God, now absent, now present.” Paired with The Beatles’ classic song performed by The Gray Havens, I find this a fitting deepening ground for an early Sunday evening before pressing into the responsibilities of a new week.

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A BlackBird Singing
by R. S. Thomas

It seems wrong that out of this bird,
Black, bold, a suggestion of dark
Places about it, there yet should come
Such rich music, as though the notes'
Ore were changed to a rare metal
At one touch of that bright bill.

You have heard it often, alone at your desk
In a green April, your mind drawn
Away from its work by sweet disturbance
Of the mild evening outside your room.

A slow singer, but loading each phrase
With history's overtones, love, joy
And grief learned by his dark tribe
In other orchards and passed on
Instinctively as they are now,
But fresh always with new tears.

from R. S. Thomas: Collected Poems 1945-1990, published by Phoenix Press, 1993: pg. 85