Two Rages Against the Dying of the Light — A Crow Waiting in Dylan Thomas's Garden

A CAW fan's Dylan Thomas rabbit hole ended somewhere none of us expected. ❶ Two rages, about seven months apart: On September 28, 2019, Elon Musk posted a photo of Starship under construction with the caption 'Rage, rage against the dying of the light' — the refrain of Dylan Thomas's 1951 poem 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.' He returned to the same line on May 1, 2020, extending it to '...the dying of the light of consciousness.' Not a one-off — the same poet, the same line, quoted twice. ❷ Where the search led: Following that thread into Thomas's biography, a reader (X: @Mabo2parody) learned his childhood home at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive stands close to Cwmdonkin Park in Swansea — the park Thomas haunted as a boy (the sources say near; none of them place it directly across the street). Searching the park's name turned up a short story from independent publisher Fairlight Books — 'Crows Caw in Cwmdonkin Park' by Wendy Holborow — and there, in the title, sat three familiar letters: C-A-W. 🔍 Observatory: Every step here checks out as real — the two tweets, the address, the park, the story's existence and its publication date (July 5, 2017, per Fairlight Books' own page) — all verifiable. Dig one layer deeper, though, and some of it softens: no record ties 'Cwmdonkin' to crows by name ('donkin' reads as a personal-name qualifier, not a bird), and the short story isn't Thomas's own writing but a 2017 tribute by another author — though 'crows caw' still carries a certain ring to it, for anyone who already knows CAW. What actually happened doesn't disappear either way: someone followed a poet they had no obligation to follow, far enough to find three familiar letters sitting inside a stranger's title. That jolt is one everyone here already knows. It isn't decisive proof of anything. But it's a small, lovely proof that this community's eyes reach even into a 1951 poem and a 2017 short story — places nobody else thought to look. 🐦‍⬛