After The Funeral (In Memory Of Ann Jones)
After
the
funeral,
mule
praises,
brays,
Windshake
of
sailshaped
ears,
muffle-toed
tap
Tap
happily
of
one
peg
in
the
thick
Grave's
foot,
blinds
down
the
lids,
the
teeth
in
black,
The
spittled
eyes,
the
salt
ponds
in
the
sleeves,
Morning
smack
of
the
spade
that
wakes
up
sleep,
Shakes
a
desolate
boy
who
slits
his
throat
In
the
dark
of
the
coffin
and
sheds
dry
leaves,
That
breaks
one
bone
to
light
with
a
judgment
clout'
After
the
feast
of
tear-stuffed
time
and
thistles
In
a
room
with
a
stuffed
fox
and
a
stale
fern,
I
stand,
for
this
memorial's
sake,
alone
In
the
snivelling
hours
with
dead,
humped
Ann
Whose
hodded,
fountain
heart
once
fell
in
puddles
Round
the
parched
worlds
of
Wales
and
drowned
each
sun
(Though
this
for
her
is
a
monstrous
image
blindly
Magnified
out
of
praise;
her
death
was
a
still
drop;
She
would
not
have
me
sinking
in
the
holy
Flood
of
her
heart's
fame;
she
would
lie
dumb
and
deep
And
need
no
druid
of
her
broken
body).
But
I,
Ann's
bard
on
a
raised
hearth,
call
all
The
seas
to
service
that
her
wood-tongued
virtue
Babble
like
a
bellbuoy
over
the
hymning
heads,
Bow
down
the
walls
of
the
ferned
and
foxy
woods
That
her
love
sing
and
swing
through
a
brown
chapel,
Blees
her
bent
spirit
with
four,
crossing
birds.
Her
flesh
was
meek
as
milk,
but
this
skyward
statue
With
the
wild
breast
and
blessed
and
giant
skull
Is
carved
from
her
in
a
room
with
a
wet
window
In
a
fiercely
mourning
house
in
a
crooked
year.
I
know
her
scrubbed
and
sour
humble
hands
Lie
with
religion
in
their
cramp,
her
threadbare
Whisper
in
a
damp
word,
her
wits
drilled
hollow,
Her
fist
of
a
face
died
clenched
on
a
round
pain;
And
sculptured
Ann
is
seventy
years
of
stone.
These
cloud-sopped,
marble
hands,
this
monumental
Argument
of
the
hewn
voice,
gesture
and
psalm
Storm
me
forever
over
her
grave
until
The
stuffed
lung
of
the
fox
twitch
and
cry
Love
And
the
strutting
fern
lay
seeds
on
the
black
sill.
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas (born October 27, 1914, Swansea, Glamorgan [now in Swansea], Wales—died November 9, 1953, New York, New York, U.S.) Welsh poet and prose writer whose work is known for its comic exuberance, rhapsodic lilt, and pathos. His personal life, punctuated by reckless bouts of drinking, was notorious. Thomas spent his childhood in southwestern Wales. His father taught English at the Swansea grammar school, which in due course the boy attended. Because Dylan’s mother was a farmer’s daughter, he had a country home he could go to when on holiday. His poem “Fern Hill” (1946) describes its joys.