incarnation at Manafon

by Isabel Chenot

remembering R. S. Thomas, for Alexander

Dank straw. It needles
at a rusted plow –
bedded with excrement and larval beetles.
The cowherd’s vacant as the cow.

Grey, huddled walls.
John and his lean, late
wife’s tackle scrawls
there, fear and hate.

Clusters of rime, inscrutable
as angels, hang where darkness leaks.
Now the dunce shepherd
of due time

attends: the stable
festers the sublime until it reeks.
The poem, humankind, ekes
out a lucid word
for lamb.

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Isabel Chenot has loved, memorized, and practiced poetry all her remembered life. Some of her poems are collected in The Joseph Tree, available from Wiseblood books.