The Coming by R.S. Thomas
And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, A river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. many People
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.
“The Coming” is in many ways perfect for Lent. With Thomas’s charistically sparce language, he suggests to us a world in great need of love and recreation that only God could bring. He paints a picture of the desperation of the world and the bleakness of the task set before the Son.
Here the Son looked long and hard at the wilderness that lay before him; the wilderness was not of a single place – such as he visited during the temptations – but of the whole world: a wilderness that cried out for love in the midst of its pain and despair. At the end of the poem the Son said, as we knew he always would, ‘Let me go there’. He knew the enormity of the task that lay before him, he understood fully the ambiguity that the wilderness always represented, he appreciated the depth of the despair laid out before him – and still he chose to go.
Taken from Let Us Go There by Paula Gooder, p. 15.