I’ve posted this poem before. I wrote it in the late ‘80s & it’s always had particular significance for me, initiating as it did a series of autobiographical poems dealing with earliest memory. 

I have no recollection of the War; I was only 9 months old when it ended. But its penumbra lay across the late ‘40s of my earliest recollection & into the 1950s of my childhood. The untouched bombsites of South London, acres of blank dereliction; the terraces of houses, their severed shored-up ends carrying the tracery of fireplaces, the ghost outlines of staircases; the air raid siren on its derrick by the tram station half way along Balham High Street.  And most of all my parents’ anecdotes: Mum, pregnant with me, blown along the corridor in our upstairs flat when a V2 destroyed the pub at the end of Emmanuel Road; my parents sitting in deckchairs on the flat roof of the block of flats where our friends the Kemps lived, watching the searchlights switching back & forth across the night sky during the bombing of the docklands; Dad in his Home Guard uniform, throwing hand grenades at concrete blocks on Wandsworth Common…

For all of us growing up at that time, the War provided the context wherein all assessment of present experience & future speculation was made.  Even now I feel its immanence.

STILLE NACHT

On the night
that I was born,
the bells rang out
across the world.

In Coventry, in Dresden,
the cathedral bones sheltered
worshippers with candles,
witnessing the ruins.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau,
the story goes,
the death’s-head guards
sang, “Stille nacht,

heilige nacht”.  Their voices
slid across the Polish snow.
The sweetest tenor was Ukrainian,
the man they called Peter the Silent. 

He never spoke and he killed
with a lead-filled stick.
In the Union Factory, packing shells,
they dreamed of Moses.

**

In Horton Kirby, fields froze
and ice deadlocked the lanes.
My father rose in the cold
blue-before-dawn light

and cycled sideways,
wreathed in silver mist,
to the hospital.  Each turn
of the track betrayed him 

and scarred by thorns and gravel,
he bled by our bedside.
My mother laughed, she remembers,
as the nurse administered.

“Been in the wars?” she asked.
Outside, across the Weald,
from out of a cloudless dawn
the buzz bombs crumpled London.

**

Outside a town in the Ardennes
Private Taunitz hung
like a crippled kite
high in a tree.

A cruciform against the sky,
he seemed to run forever
through the branches,
running home for the new year.

Outside Budapest three men
diced for roubles
in the shelter of a tank.
Fitful rain, a moonless night.

Sasha struck a match
across the red star
on his helmet, the red star
that led them to this place.

Extra vodka, extra cigarettes,
a rabbit stewed,
the tolling of artillery
to celebrate the day.

**

The blackouts drawn,
December light invaded.
We awoke, slapped hard
by the early world.

Our siren voices
climbed into the morning,
a choir of outrage,
insect-thin but passionate.

Through tears our parents
smiled: within the song
of our despair they heard
a different tune.

And as our voices
sucked the air, swallowing
the grumble of the bombs,
only the bells survived.