The Wise Woman asked if I could hear them, the owls calling to each other.
I could not. The hearing aids were already in their case for the night.
But later, getting up before dawn, I heard them — were the owls closer or was the house quieter? They were barred owls by their call. “Who, who are you?”
I, a lifelong reader of poets, am just finding R.S. Thomas, 1913-2000, a Welsh clergyman. He began his poem “The Other” with these lines:
There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl
calling
far off and a fox barking
miles away.
The sleepless poet thinks of the nearby ocean, with its swells breaking on the long shore by the lightless village.
And the
thought comes
of that other being who is
awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.
That’s Thomas’s language, not mine. But, like him, I hear the owls and somehow feel connected to something so vast I can’t imagine it.
• Source: All Poetry has a selection here of R.S. Thomas’s poems here:
https://allpoetry.com/R-S-Thomas
“The Other” is here:
Thanks for sharing this! I have not read any poetry by R. S. Thomas… Heber, perhaps what you are hearing and sensing is the same “something vast” that Richard Byrd saw when isolated in Antarctica. He called it, “the Cosmos.”
ReplyDeleteThanks, Karen. I'm with Byrd: The cosmos is a vast place but it's our place. I remember hearing a hymn that says "This world is not my home; I'm just a-passing through." Even as a child, I thought there was something off with that point of view.
ReplyDelete