Trusting Thomas

The God of your verses is one you can hear,
walking through the Welsh country
of thatch and chimney pots and gorse.
He’s invisible, as eternal as whatever is,
as lonely as the flea-ridden horse
being pet by a group of brothers
while dad fixes the car on the hard shoulder,
one hot summer day some twenty years ago.
Even through the haze of what you always loathed:
refrigerators, washers, tech - your voice
and God stand strange and utterly alone by choice.
If reading is to find a mind more original
than yours, you were as much a prophet as
Shadrach, Meshach, et al. Trusting in that God
of yours, who isn't seen but heard as whispering,
footfalls, the gears of years’ turning
must not have seemed so terrible, you'd hope.
As much as age-old bitterness wrinkles your jowls
in photographs, and nationalistic quotes,
and all the stories of your petty wrath.
The poems like a secret in the bones.