In retirement hush
the noise of the babies
whom in the long ago years are
soundly sleeping,
grown by the farmers,
brought up on shore by the fishers,
might become the tradesmen,
– themselves the future and
one day pensioners,
could apprentice to a cobbler,
learn to garden children as a schoolteacher,
tread the rounds of streets as a postman,
feed the masses as a restaurateur and
pull pints as a publican,
evade as long as possible the undertaker
sire their own babies with a wife and
perhaps even tangle with the fancy woman,
lose their way as a drunkard,
stitch dreams as a dressmaker,
espouse piety as a preacher,
guard the peace as a policeman
vainly trying to contain the webfoot
raucously vibrant, cocklewomen
in glorious opposition and
contrast to the tidy wives…
© Andrew Wilson, 2026
After the second paragraph of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood – A Play for Voices, 1954.
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Grace in FormForAll, Poetry Forms, invites us to write a Golden Shovel in which you:
Choose a line from a poem that resonates with you.
*Build your poem so each line ends with a word from that line.
*Keep the words in order, forming the original line down the right margin.
*Let your poem move in its own direction. Surprise us!
*Include attribution (after [poet])
Strictly speaking, the Golden Shovel should use just one word from the original poem at the end of each line, but since both the original text and the new poem are lists, it didn’t seem right to separate Thomas’s original adjectives in some instances, or have a surfeit of definite articles…