remember her. she is forgetting.
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.
This is how Dylan Thomas introduces us to the sleeping Welsh village of Llaregyb , where everyone is a tad mad and the borderline between dream and waking is fluid. Among those dream-drunk sleepers is Captain Cat, on whose round and hairy belly is tattooed “I Love You Rosie Probert.” Captain Cat…old, sightless, dreaming of companions lost at sea, dreaming of love and what was and never can be again. Captain Cat who rings the bell to waken the sleeping village.
Outside, the sun springs down on the rough and tumbling town. It runs through the hedges of Goosegog Lane, cuffing the birds to sing. Spring whips green down Cockle Row, and the shells ring out. Llaregyb this snip of a morning is wildfruit and warm, the streets, fields, sands and waters springing in the young sun.
An ordinary morning in an ordinary spring in an ordinary Welsh fishing village populated by ordinary Welshmen and women who live ordinary lives and love ordinary loves. People neither wholly bad nor good, who have earned their small rewards and small punishments, who remember and forget, who forget to remember the small surprising ordinary tendernesses that make every day less ordinary. And dead Rosie Probert, whose only memorial is a tattoo on the belly of a blind landlocked sea captain, poor dead Rosie, sliding into the sightless waking-sleep of Captain Cat, has but a single request:
Remember her.
She is forgetting.
The earth which filled her mouth
Is vanishing from her.
Remember me.
I have forgotten you.
I am going into the darkness of the darkness for ever.
I have forgotten that I was ever born.
Remember her.
(From Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas)
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