Several folk have asked me about the extract of the poem that I used as part of my sermon on Remembrance Sunday. The poem is about civilian experience of the Blitz in London during the Second World War, and the extract was from the third section of the poem 'The Burning of the Leaves' by Laurence Binyon.Stooping and feeble, leaning on a stick,An old man with his vague feet stirs the dust,Searching a strange world for he knows not whatAmong haphazard stone and crumbled brick.He cannot adjustWhat his eyes see to memory's golden land,Shut off by the iron curtain of today:The past is all the present he has got.Now, as he bends to peerInto the rubble, he picks up in his hand(Death has been here!)Something defaced, naked and bruised: a doll,A child's doll, blankly smiling with wide eyesAnd oh, how human in its helplessness!Pondered in weak fingersHe holds it puzzled: wondering, where is sheThe small motherWhose pleasure was to clothe it and caress,Who hugged it with a motherhood foreknown,Who ran to comfort its imagined criesAnd gave it pretty sorrows for its own?No one replies.
