As a whisper in the darkness
As the hushing of the wind
As the rising of a salmon
When the water rims with ripples
Life moved laboriously over death.
As the programme seller in the audience
Blind to the passion on the stage
As the swimmer in a surging sea
As the Britisher in a foreign country
Life busied itself with death.
The blue overalls and metal helmets
The lorries, one time used for coal,
The worried warden and the rescue worker
Hovered and hurried among the ruins.
Under this pile of fallen masonry
Under those spillikins of beams
Where number thirty two lies shattered
There may be a body
Dig
For there may be a body.
Distorted corpse once breathed slum air
Lived in the grey dust where it died;
Is it for this that bending we strived
And fought in other’s blood and other’s sorrow
To reach these wretched mangled remains?
Is it for this that we ached in the darkness
Not knowing that nearby
Another house had fallen
To the blast of that same bomb.
Sweat fell, we were not the strong and young
They were out training, preparing,
We are the best of those remaining
We are the mellow and the hardened
And though our backs are hard of bending
Under aloofness our souls bend rending
The sorrow out of the bereaved father’s breast
Tearing it out and holding it in our own hands
Adopting it to our own bodies
Caring for the children we had never seen
Sometimes we pray to be hardened and callous
But God turns a deaf ear
And we know hate and sorrow,
Intimately
And we do not mind dying tomorrow.
Tim Bentinck reads Dawn After the Raid