When I woke, the town spoke. <br />Birds and clocks and cross bells <br />Dinned aside the coiling crowd, <br />The reptile profligates in a flame, <br />Spoilers and pokers of sleep, <br />The next-door sea dispelled <br />Frogs and satans and woman-luck, <br />While a man outside with a billhook, <br />Up to his head in his blood, <br />Cutting the morning off, <br />The warm-veined double of Time <br />And his scarving beard from a book, <br />Slashed down the last snake as though <br />It were a wand or subtle bough, <br />Its tongue peeled in the wrap of a leaf. <br /> <br />Every morning I make, <br />God in bed, good and bad, <br />After a water-face walk, <br />The death-stagged scatter-breath <br />Mammoth and sparrowfall <br />Everybody's earth. <br />Where birds ride like leaves and boats like ducks <br />I heard, this morning, waking, <br />Crossly out of the town noises <br />A voice in the erected air, <br />No prophet-progeny of mine, <br />Cry my sea town was breaking. <br />No Time, spoke the clocks, no God, rang the bells, <br />I drew the white sheet over the islands <br />And the coins on my eyelids sang like shells.<br /><br />Dylan Thomas<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/when-i-woke-2/
