A cormorant for Dylan

Dylan Thomas was born 100 years ago today.
His own Poem on his Birthday was written on his 35th. (He died four years later.) The third line mentions cormorants and there are numerous references to other birds, fish and mammals, all of which he would have seen in and around the sand banks and mud flats of the Tâf estuary below his boat house 'on stilts'.

It was a wet and murky day on the coast and when I walked to the cliffs in the late afternoon the sea was only a slightly duller grey than the sky with an oily burnished sheen on it. The occasional cormorant scudded by with audible wing beats but this one remained perched on the sea stack, peering alternately up and down the coast as if expecting a visitor. Its beady blue eyes could have been the poet's as he registered the passing of time, the flux of the tides and the comings and goings of local people in the small coastal community of Laugharne, in the next county.

You can hear Dylan Thomas read his 35th birthday poem here.

It's also Sylvia Plath's birthday. She would have been 82 today.