When once the twilight locks no longer

Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas portrait

1914 to 1953

Poem Image
Track 1

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But when the stars, assuming shape,
And bags of blood let out their flies ;
The fences of the light are down,
And swallowed dry the waters of the breast.
The redhaired cancer still alive,
All issue armoured, of the grave,
The cataracted eyes that filmed their cloth;
He had by heart the Christ-cross-row of death.
Who periscope through flowers to the sky.
Sleep navigates the tides of time;
Drew in his eyes the straws of sleep,
Some dead undid their bushy jaws,
When once the twilight locks no longer
Locked in the long worm of my finger
And mother milk was stiff as sand,
Gives up its dead to such a working sea;
That, sewn to me by nerve and brain,
All but the briskest riders thrown,
The milky acid on each hinge,
And held a little sabbath with the sun,
Where fishes’ food is fed the shades
And leave the poppied pickthank where he lies;
That globe itself of hair and bone
And sleep rolls mute above the beds
When the galactic sea was sucked
I sent my own ambassador to light;
Had stringed my flask of matter to his rib.
The mouth of time sucked, like a sponge,
He blew like powder to the light
When once the twilight screws were turned,
By trick or chance he fell asleep
The dry Sargasso of the tomb
A worker in the morning town,
To rob me of my fluids in his heart.
He drowned his father’s magics in a dream.
And all the dry seabed unlocked,
Nor damned the sea that sped about my fist,
And conjured up a carcass shape
My fuses timed to charge his heart,
I sent my creature scouting on the globe,
And worlds hang on the trees.
Awake, my sleeper, to the sun,

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Poet portrait