It’s International Dylan Thomas Day – #DylanDay / #DyddDylan, if you’re looking for related posts on social media. I’ve written a new poem to mark the occasion, inspired by thoughts of Dylan Thomas’s vital presence in poetry, the sound and feel of his words and their influence on my own writing path.
I remember looking at the Dylan Thomas statue in Swansea’s Marina and thinking he must have been someone very special. I grew up surrounded by his memory – the Dylan Thomas Theatre, the Dylan Thomas Centre (where I would later perform my own poetry) and the Dylan Thomas Birthplace. Close to the birthplace was Cwmdonkin Park, where Dylan would have walked and played as a boy. The discovery of a stone there, bearing a famous quote from Fern Hill brought him to life for me, but that’s another story: Love Song – Poetry for Dylan Thomas Day.
Today, I want to focus on the man as inspiration – so many writers would not be writing without his example. His poems gave us a new and unique way of reading and understanding language and have encouraged our own experiments. If poetry is our deepest means of expression, let us never be afraid to go further for the right words. It matters.
For Dylan
You of the spiral-shell curls,
the sea-chained voice.
No wonder the waves
made a play for your soul,
called you to find
every treasure of words:
all huddled sounds,
all glistered truths.
And when you found them,
how you cried of
windfall, heron priested shores.
I love your words: they are pages of me.
And as I was young, not easy,
they held the seeds of a life
I would tread, the how shall my animal
questions this crossroads.
K. S. Moore
