After the Bombing
Poet Diane Pacitti reflects on the bombing of St James’ church in 1940.
The smell assaulted them: sour damp and mould;
Raw clay, the acrid lingering of smoke
And fierce burn. They climbed across charred beams.
They a on windows turned to splintered glass.
The rector’s wife watched her old life pulled out
Object by object: a child’s mackintosh,
Blankets, a boot, all smeared and thicked with mud:
And those other dug-out things, each of them now
Painfully intimate, that she must place
Apart from her own, belongings of the two
Struck near the shelter which they could not reach:
The verger died first, and then his wife.
On Christmas Day, they stood in numbing cold.
The plasticised window sheets flapped in the wind.
The cloth-bound prayer-books were water-warped;
The pages singed, mud - stained. But still they prayed.
Duty. Restraint. Perhaps leavened with a flash
of defiant humour. This was the uniform
To be worn in public: fears and grief concealed
Beneath that tightly buttoned battle-dress.
A greeting to New York one Easter Day.
A broadcast in French. This church at the heart
Of bombed London, this church-jewel of Wren,
Became a symbol of unconquered faith,
Of quiet resistance. Stage by stage they cleared
The once-precious debris, which they piled
Beside the tree; they made a makeshift church
Inside the blackened shell. And still they prayed.
Diane Pacitti, 2021
They drift unseen
over war-tautened faces
over silent prayers
being screamed from the heart;
some of them are winged
with frail filaments
which spin light
in scarcely - visible threads.
Such a reckless-trusting act
of the parent plant
which surrendered to air
its speck-sized lives
whose survival depends
on immersion in dark earth;
yet they are given up
to the gusts
and fitfulness of wind.
See how they veer
over concrete, brick and slate;
each breath of wind is toying
with multiple crashing deaths.
Watch them burst free
from pod, plant and ground.
Earth-motes transformed
to a swirl of pointillist light:
Earth - lives curled,
shrunk into a husk, they drift:
at last they descend
as unpredictable gift.
Diane Pacitti, 2021
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