Poem on my Birthday

For at least twenty years of so, on my birthday, I have read Dylan Thomas's "Poem On His Birthday". When I turned 40, I was troubled to realize that I had outlived him. As poet, I always hoped to 'be a writer' and it was the driving force in my early life from my teens through college. Even the choice of the ministry early on in college was, in part, the thought of a career that would support a writer. Only later did I come to realize that you either write or you don't. I was never much concerned with being published; I just craved the freedom to consider and express ideas. Well, more on that someday I suppose. But at a certain age, you begin to look at what your heroes had accomplished by your age and reflect on your own success's (or failures). I am beginning to think about the same thing with respect to sailing (how many years do I have left that I could physically handle a boat? Ten? Fifteen?). Part of the impetus for this blog is to address the question, where the hell did all the years go?

Ok, Ok, let's just get to the poem. Thomas is an uncracked cypher to me. Some poems you can read in a single sitting and just get (that would certainly be anything I have ever written, I suspect) and others you read and read and puzzle about. I read somewhere that they found 60 or 70 pages of notes for his last poem on which he had written perhaps twenty lines, something like that anyway. (I know the Literature Majors are already howling in the depths of their philistine-populated Hell, sorry) Dylan Thomas cries out, in my mind, to be read out loud and to be read drunk or stoned (I have done both on previous birthdays). So each year, sitting alone in my sun-filled living room, surrounded by my books; a glass or red wine or scotch; maybe a pipe of some heady leaf (legal or illegal), I would roar out this poem to " whatever gods may be" . This was (and is) my exultant word-drunk ritual at birthday time; and like any ritual, not fully comprehended . . . pointing outside itself . . . cracking the heavens and pulling us beyond.

This is the end of the poem . . . go read the rest, preferably on your birthday. No pipe today, but a good glass of Famous Grouse and a clear, icy cold afternoon before the first snowstorm of the winter. And thoughts of my friend who celebrated his birthday yesterday in Paris.

Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,
Count my blessing aloud:
Four elements and five
Senses, and man a spirit in love
Tangling through this spun slime
To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come
And the lost, moonshine domes,
And the sea that hides his secret selves
Deep in its black, base bones,
Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,
And this last blessing most,

That the closer I move
To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
The louder the sun blooms
And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;
And every wave of the way
And gale I tackle, the whole world then,
With more triumphant faith
Than ever was since the world was said,
Spins its morning of praise,

I hear the bouncing hills
Grow larked and greener at berry brown
Fall and dew larks sing
Taller this thunderclap spring, and how
More spanned with angles ride
The mansouled fiery island! Oh,
Holier then their eyes,
And my shining men no more alone
As I sail out to die.