We stand looking at

each other. I take the word ‘prayer’

and present it to them. I wait idly

what their lips will

make of it. But they hand back

such presents. I am left alone

with no echoes to the amen

I dreamed of.  I am saved by the music

from the emptiness of this place

of despair. As the melody rises

from nothing, their mouths take up the tune,

and the roof listens. I call on God

in the after silence, and my shadow

wrestles with him upon a wall

of plaster, that has all the nation’s

hardness in it. They see me thrown

without movement of their oblique eyes.

R.S. Thomas (1913-2000), Eglwys Fach 1954-1967.