I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
I’m writing this in the afterglow of an Easter spent in Foz Coa in Portugal. I was lucky enough to be taken to see the prehistoric rock engravings deep within the valley – horses, goats even a fish – 20, 000 years old. I deliberately won’t reproduce them here, as the moment of seeing this early art was totally unrepeatable.
We were taken at night and as the guide suddenly illuminated the rock, there they were!
Something about this experience, reminded me of Thomas’s poem. Perhaps, it was the deep link to the secrets of nature. Perhaps it was the unexpected sense of the spiritual, the sudden illumination, that felt almost religious. Perhaps, it was the game they seemed to be playing between transience and eternity – the extraordinary treasure in the field that you could easily pass by without noticing.
And, of course, that is what Thomas’s deceptively simple yet profound poem is about. Treasuring the great gifts that our eyes, worn out from over-familiarity, no longer see. Restoring to our vision these fragments of beauty.
