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And death shall have no dominion.
Dead mean naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Through they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.
Incarnate devil in a talking snake,
The central plains of Asia in his garden,
In shaping-time the circle stung awake,
In shapes of sin forked out the bearded apple,
And God walked there who was a fiddling warden
And played down pardon from the heavens' hill.

When we were strangers to the guided seas,
A handmade moon half holy in a cloud,
The wisemen tell me that the garden gods
Twined good and evil on an eastern tree;
And when the moon rose windily it was
Black as the beast and paler than the cross.

We in our Eden knew the secret guardian
In sacred waters that no frost could harden,
And in the mighty mornings of the earth;
Hell in a horn of sulphur and the cloven myth,
All heaven in the midnight of the sun,
A serpent fiddled in the shaping-time.
I

I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels,
Forged in man's minerals, the brassy orator
Laying my ghost in metal,
The scales of this twin world tread on the double,
My half ghost in armour hold hard in death's corridor,
To my man-iron sidle.

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels,
Bright as her spinning-wheels, the colic season
Worked on a world of petals;
She threads off the sap and needles, blood and bubble
Casts to the pine roots, raising man like a mountain
Out of the naked entrail.

Beginning with doom in the ghost, and the springing marvels,
Image of images, my metal phantom
Forcing forth through the harebell,
My man of leaves and the bronze root, mortal, unmortal,
I, in my fusion of rose and male motion,
Create this twin miracle.

This is the fortune of manhood: the natural peril,
A steeplejack tower, bonerailed and masterless,
No death more natural;
Thus the shadowless man or ox, and the pictured devil,
In seizure of silence commit the dead nuisance.
The natural parallel.

My images stalk the trees and the slant sap's tunnel,
No tread more perilous, the green steps and spire
Mount on man's footfall,
I with the wooden insect in the tree of nettles,
In the glass bed of grapes with snail and flower,
Hearing the weather fall.

Intricate manhood of ending, the invalid rivals,
Voyaging clockwise off the symboled harbour,
Finding the water final,
On the consumptives' terrace taking their two farewells,
Sail on the level, the departing adventure,
To the sea-blown arrival.

II

They climb the country pinnacle,
Twelve winds encounter by the white host at pasture,
Corner the mounted meadows in the hill corral;
They see the squirrel stumble,
The haring snail go giddily round the flower,
A quarrel of weathers and trees in the windy spiral.

As they dive, the dust settles,
The cadaverous gravels, falls thick and steadily,
The highroad of water where the seabear and mackerel
Turn the long sea arterial
Turning a petrol face blind to the enemy
Turning the riderless dead by the channel wall.

(Death instrumental,
Splitting the long eye open, and the spiral turnkey,
Your corkscrew grave centred in navel and ******,
The neck of the nostril,
Under the mask and the ether, they making ******
The tray of knives, the antiseptic funeral;

Bring out the black patrol,
Your monstrous officers and the decaying army,
The sexton sentinel, garrisoned under thistles,
A ****-on-a-dunghill
Crowing to Lazarus the morning is vanity,
Dust be your saviour under the conjured soil.)

As they drown, the chime travels,
Sweetly the diver's bell in the steeple of spindrift
Rings out the Dead Sea scale;
And, clapped in water till the triton dangles,
Strung by the flaxen whale-****, from the hangman's raft,
Hear they the salt glass breakers and the tongues of burial.

(Turn the sea-spindle lateral,
The grooved land rotating, that the stylus of lightning
Dazzle this face of voices on the moon-turned table,
Let the wax disk babble
Shames and the damp dishonours, the relic scraping.
These are your years' recorders. The circular world stands still.)

III

They suffer the undead water where the turtle nibbles,
Come unto sea-stuck towers, at the fibre scaling,
The flight of the carnal skull
And the cell-stepped thimble;
Suffer, my topsy-turvies, that a double angel
Sprout from the stony lockers like a tree on Aran.

Be by your one ghost pierced, his pointed ferrule,
Brass and the bodiless image, on a stick of folly
Star-set at Jacob's angle,
Smoke hill and hophead's valley,
And the five-fathomed Hamlet on his father's coral
Thrusting the tom-thumb vision up the iron mile.

Suffer the slash of vision by the fin-green stubble,
Be by the ships' sea broken at the manstring anchored
The stoved bones' voyage downward
In the shipwreck of muscle;
Give over, lovers, locking, and the seawax struggle,
Love like a mist or fire through the bed of eels.

And in the pincers of the boiling circle,
The sea and instrument, nicked in the locks of time,
My great blood's iron single
In the pouring town,
I, in a wind on fire, from green Adam's cradle,
No man more magical, clawed out the crocodile.

Man was the scales, the death birds on enamel,
Tail, Nile, and snout, a saddler of the rushes,
Time in the hourless houses
Shaking the sea-hatched skull,
And, as for oils and ointments on the flying grail,
All-hollowed man wept for his white apparel.

Man was Cadaver's masker, the harnessing mantle,
Windily master of man was the rotten fathom,
My ghost in his metal neptune
Forged in man's mineral.
This was the god of beginning in the intricate seawhirl,
And my images roared and rose on heaven's hill.
Shalini Nayar Sep 2014
The candy-cane stripes mingle freely among the
Saffron-clothed C moon and fourteen-handed star.
They swim navy-like in the blue.

The reds and whites alternate
Till the states are properly represented.
They ask of nothing more, nothing more.

What does it hold? What does it teach us?
The wild history of it roars and thunders
Like a hurricane that never stops.

But it did. How did we overthrow
Something so mighty, so white
As an unstoppable hurricane?

And the purpose of it all? Freedom.
Freedom and independence. Two righteous
Morals so hard to obtain.

At what cost did we attain them?
Bloodshed, shrieks, lies, torment and tears.
It was all worth it, love, all of it.

When Jack finally crawled down the beanstalk,
We never flew higher, braver or breezier
With such dignity and unfaltering spirit.

We have come so far to this place, this place
Where hatred shreds to little warm hearts and people
Are just people no matter how colourful they are.

We’re a rare hybrid of ethics: the sarong-laden man milking the rubber tree
Is no different than the blackened faces down in the tin mines
And the ones that hand-built the train tracks, woody and sturdy.

Seven chants of it that fateful afternoon
And we cried knowing, knowing we have made it.
Toiled sweat never tasted sweeter. Merdeka!

Most of us laughed and rejoiced.
Some were heard wailing and flying off to where
They rightfully belong. We don’t want you here. We never did.

The dove’s free now,
Free of thick metal bars
That caged it for centuries and

It flies now, wings spread into
A feathery horizon, windily flapping back and forth
Into a new world, a new promise called Malaysia.

Shalini Nayar
© 2002
The half-shut doors through which we heard that music
Are softly closed.  Horns mutter down to silence.
The stars whirl out, the night grows deep.
Darkness settles upon us.  A vague refrain
Drowsily teases at the drowsy brain.
In numberless rooms we stretch ourselves and sleep.

Where have we been?  What savage chaos of music
Whirls in our dreams?--We suddenly rise in darkness,
Open our eyes, cry out, and sleep once more.
We dream we are numberless sea-waves languidly foaming
A warm white moonlit shore;

Or clouds blown windily over a sky at midnight,
Or chords of music scattered in hurrying darkness,
Or a singing sound of rain . . .
We open our eyes and stare at the coiling darkness,
And enter our dreams again.
If my heart was a flower,
Would you not pluck me?
If my hair was a meadow,
Would you nae huddle me?
If my hands wanted yours,
Would you not hold mine?
If my lips were cloudburst,
Would mine quench thirst?
If my dress danced windily,
Would you nae haply join in?
If my eyes were pearl oysters,
Would you freshly shuck me?
If my skin were of the Selkies,'
Would you offer me nae seas?
Jacobe Loman Nov 2016
Twiddling thumbs in a cold dark room.
Windily breeze whispers across the skin.
Stuck in this chair not knowing where to begin.

Glaring around at shadowing silhouettes.
Lifeless they lay still and at peace.
Jealously pleasing each eye.

All alone in this box.
Somehow feeling mocked.
Losing connection to the everyday normality.
Thoughts become deluded and afraid.

Thumbs picking up pace.
Sun greets with a harmonious beckon.
Light seeps through the cracks.
Thoughts travel through the mind.

Wishing never to awake.
Cherish existing without really knowing why.
Dreaming the best sovereign.
Allowing this embracement of warmth.
Cusping the morning internally.
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead man naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.
By Dylan Thomas
Mike Essig May 2015
And Death Shall Have No Dominion
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead mean naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
And Death Shall Have No Dominion


And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Through they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.
Simon Carter Nov 2020
Dylan Thomas went wearily, windily to the sea,
Where dogs ran and tongues wagged saltily,
Sea battered boats sang shanties to the bearded shore,
As the sea legged gulls barked and cried hungrily
The shadowy sun surrendered to a once bitten moon,
And the sand stood still by the windy wet dune
A tribute in the style of Dylan Thomas
Arash Salar Oct 2015
...
I am windily spreading
Out of my feelings and my death
The dream which comes by
Beyond the gates of my sight
Later again and ages
The blurred vision of whom gives a glance
In the intrinsically turbulent wine
Just for a second
And everything dies
I am thy me as wine is vines'
David Hilburn Apr 2021
Brown is our promise
Spoken like a true champ
Till a height of a comely vice
Has the spark of intuition, claimed and

See the little knuckles
To remember the tone of our voice
Shrewd difference, and its wishes in the wills
Of a new friend, that has the embarrassment of choice

Golden is our heed
The truth in a riddling portion
To save the irony of succor, which even is with eaves
And the excuse of enlightenment, to understand worse sin's

Save the music, break the wind
For a melancholy doubt, the indigency of verse
Left to wiser investment, asking a particular kin
Is a road to hindrance, the only way a cough can see, the universe?
And death shall have no dominion
Dylan Thomas - 1914-1953

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.
My poet crush. Welsh. In a furious Love with Caitlin a nubile siren singing from the rocks on the edge of the sea in the boathouse in Laugharne where Dylan put his soul to paper.

— The End —