A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

NEVER until the mankind making 

Bird beast and flower 

Fathering and all humbling darkness 

Tells with silence the last light breaking 

And the still hour 

Is come of the sea tumbling in harness 

And I must enter again the round 

Zion of the water bead 

And the synagogue of the ear of corn 

Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound 

Or sow my salt seed 

In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn 

The majesty and burning of the child's death. 

I shall not murder 

The mankind of her going with a grave truth 

Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath 

With any further 

Elegy of innocence and youth. 

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter, 

Robed in the long friends, 

The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother. 

Secret by the unmourning water 

Of the riding Thames. 

After the first death. there is no other. 

The hand that signed the paper 

THE HAND that signed the paper felled a city; 

Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath, 

Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country; 

These five kings did a king to death. 

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder, 

The finger joints are cramped with chalk; 

A goose's quill has put an end to murder 

That put an end to talk. 

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever, 

And famine grew, and locusts came; 

Great is the hand that holds dominion over 

Man by a scribbled name. 

The five kings count the dead but do not soften 

The crusted wound nor stroke the brow; 

A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven; 

Hands have no tears to flow.