Not as in the old days I pray, God.
My life is not what is was.
Yours, too, accepts the presence of the machine?
Once I would have asked healing.
I go now to be doctored, to drink sinlessly of
the blood of my brother,
to lend my flesh as manuscript of the great poem of the scalpel.
I would have knelt long, wrestling with you, wearing you down.
Hear my prayer, Lord, hear my prayer.
As though you were deaf, myriads of mortals have kept up
their shrill cry, explaining your silence by their unfitness.
It begins to appear this is not prayer is about.
It is the annihilation of difference,
the consciousness of myself in you,
of you in me; the emerging
from the adolescence of nature
into the adult geometry of the mind.
I begin to recognise anew, God of form and number.
There are questions we are the solution to,
others whose echoes we must expand to contain.
Circular as our way is, it leads not back to that snake-haunted
garden, but onward to the tall city
of glass that is the laboratory of the spirit.
by R.S.Thomas, from the collection of poems, Laboratories of the Spirit (London:Macmillan, 1975)