The Gate
(from a photograph of Dylan Thomas in Laugharne Churchyard, 1952)
I thought it was a gate you rested your elbow on in that photo from ‘52 of you in Laugharne Churchyard. Dickie-bowed in waist-height undergrowth. Smarter than your denim Boathouse look. But unsmiling, doleful even. Beset that summer with yet more tax and rent demands. Your father dying. You, with just a winter and one summer left. The poems all out there save the spring-trap rhymes of Prologue, and the Elegy unfinished at the roots of the sea. I longed to reach that gate myself, be where you stood, see what you saw. Those dingled pathways into light brought days alive in greenfire glory. I kept in every house I owned, a poster of that photo on my wall - a prompt, a call, a beckoning. Except the gate was railings round a grave, and the railings gone with all the undergrowth. Nothing to rest back against when finally I found the spot at last. Trapped there between the graves, you wear the face of your Lament, look out so longingly at what goes on day in day out in, rooms like mine - loving, living, making do. As sure as death is sure (your line), that gate won’t let you through to us, or us to you. But it opened free a world we didn’t know was there, with so much upswung heart moonhid and mute until you nightingaled it round, netted live as words, a peerless singing firmament. Dear Dylan, Why in horror’s name go back there a fourth time? America is cruel. It eats its own. Witness the monster it’s thrown up lately. Think Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, and give the fiend a bottle-blond comb-over. Your cache of poems is worth a zillion times what he’s slimeballed his way to. That senseless, lonely, pathetic New York death should be his, not yours. Enough. I had to get that off my chest, mourn what you might have done if you’d been on, not in, your Laugharne hillside a few years longer. We owe you such a lot (how’s that for a pecuniary turn-around). We who come like tides; leave tracelessly as moonlight. While you stay ever vital. Walking through the door of Brown’s, throwing wide your alliterative arms to cry: I’m back. Raise a glass. Cheers, Dylan, Cheers.
John Sewell
