a fantastic photograph of Dylan Thomas & a female admirer.

AFTER COMMUNION (after Dylan Thomas's 'After the Funeral')
written by: jim bellamy

"After communion, prayer blazes: slaves,
in a spinned shape of spheres, shuffle soundly
down the roed taps of the dregs in the grave,
blinded down the lids, with the wafer snapt,
and the spittled rotor, as wined-in as a nave,
mourning the smacked stacks of the spade that digs
deep, where snakes and desolate dreams drum
in the dark droves of the coffin that sheds dry light
over the raping bone, where the night lies dumbed
by the routed thistle, and the feast of eden glides
into a damsoned scheme of jonquilled whistles
in a room that is room once only;
and there I stand, for this communial sake, atoned
by the shrines of the owls that are red,
with Jesu himself buried in the coal-black shade
of the snivering, mastering lathe,
whose babied churning turns the city's ridgeward,
(although for this city, the ridgeward world is dead).
And I, a prayerbooked rouser, command a place
for the world to serve in service to its virtue;
and the babbles scour, and the rich beginnings power
a cell of knelling in the cipressed face
of god in his pity combed, where the cantering fires
lob along the palls and burn and briar,
that this love of life may sing within the appled
chapel of the non-concocted light
and the whiskered word of those who've tarnished taste
may bless the bended spirit of the fall
that is the holy face. And this glad statue,
with all its wildened bestiaries and skulls,
is carved here from the room that is room once only,
and in a fierce and mourning house lies spilled,
where, lord knows, the world is rent to rights.
I know the loved and soothing humble hands
that crave; I know the heaving bosom of the sun
that sings for awe; I know the moist religion of the lamps
that gutter in their music and grow young
as time allows. For the sad words; the clenched
and runing bells of thunder; the glad spurs
that sculpt these frozen verses, move the stone:
these shroud-clapt, marble muses, this ensign
storms now forever where the priesthoods drome
and strut god's love into a world of paradigm."

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Copyright JDB 1998

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nb. "After Communion" is not truly christian in nature.