Birmingham 1947

I grew up playing in the rubble of the Second World war.

My memory's shell-shocked standard flies

Where Birmingham, with red-rimmed eyes

Lay rubbled by my father's house;

The walk-not ways of childhood lay

By walls of shrapnel shattered clay

And rivered screams that coursed to earth

Defied the source of childhood mirth.

 

The red-brick shelters, haunted by

The smell of fear which, undispersed

By time or fortune, lay within;

The damp, the hollow-echoed cry

Of those whom distant death denied

The justice of the victor's boast:

"We held you at the drowning coast."

 

The meadow cratered, staggered skies

Cut ragged in the blood sunrise

Await the jagged cross refrain:

"Despair, resign your love of life

Old man, young boy, sad woman, child.

This bloodied reign will pluck such breath

From England's womb to do you death."

 

Where now the shrapnel of my mind

That caught the first glimpse of my kind

In some bomb-burst, explosive rhyme?

The scars are bulldozed, rubble gone

The seeds of all I issued from,

And fissures only circumscribe

The last of any warrior tribe.

 

David Lewis Paget

Reviews

[roarke]

I'd chance say this is the fertile ground of legend Mr. Paget.

[Poeticpiers]

Impressively written in perfect rhyme and meter Very descriptive both of the bomb damage but also of the emotions One of the best poems I have read recently