"A Dove with a Green Petal"
part two of the summer writing series - a Dylan Thomas reading
This warm summer evening, on a day of miraculous bee-swarms and heat like a yellow wing over Inverness, I’ve recorded three pieces by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) for our little writing series. Reading them was like stepping into the sea, dunking in the sweetest river; I get carried off on the instinctive sing-song rhythms of Thomas’s words. It’s happened since I was a teenager, and reading these, especially the final story, felt like speaking with honey under my tongue. Good for the heart, good for the brain, good for the body, to get words woven this well poured over you from time to time.
Mostly today’s offering is a reading, so you can interact with it simply that way. Sit back, make yourself a tea or pour a glass of wine, and just listen. I’m reading a wonderful mystical-and-erotic-at-once poem called “The Marriage of a Virgin,” an excerpt from a strange fervent longer poem called “Vision & Prayer,” and the full short story “A Prospect of the Sea,” which is a dizzying boy’s daydream coming of age sexy summery terrifying Edenic mythic heart-singing something, I don’t know what to call it, but it left me kind of speechless by the time I finished reading it, as you can see here, and with the title of today’s post, “a dove with a green petal,” which comes from one of the final Flood-illuminated lines of the piece, when even Noah and his ark have made their entrance.