Prayer for the Innocent Dead

Here's a few lines from Dylan Thomas' poem "Ceremony After a Fire Raid".

I saw them on the wall at the British Imperial War Museum.

Myselves
The grievers
Grieve
Among the street burned to tireless death
A child of a few hours
With its kneading mouth
Charred on the black breast of the grave
The mother dug, and its arms full of fires.

This was written in the wake of the German bombings during the Battle of Britain.

It gave me the strongest sense of what an average English citizen must have felt in those bleakest of days.

I suppose (and I can only guess) it must have seemed as though hell was not below them but somehow above, pouring hatred and loss upon all those who were innocent and familiar.

What feeling of powerlessness, what sense of weakness, what unending fear must it have extracted from their souls?

Then when all was said and done, when the sky was quiet and the earth still, what final numbness must it have left them with?

The senselessness of it all, the pulverizing effect on the psyche must have been the worst. 

Again I'm only guessing but that's what I get from the poem.  

Because it reads to me like a man unable to mourn or wail yet again, so as a writer he can only describe what he sees.  

Unemotional but evocative.

His description of death as tireless is the most striking and telling part of the stanza.

It paints a picture of annihilation as a daily visitor, a commonplace thing.  

Mundane like the garbageman or letter-carrier yet also powerful as a God, unstoppable, superhuman and most of all unceasing. 

I sense he is describing something that was beyond their ability to withstand anymore.

It reminded me of 9-11 and the horror of that morning.

Then because I am human first and American second, it made me think of what our (accidental?) bombing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan has wrought on the ordinary people of those countries.

I can imagine a beautiful poem about it will be written in their language someday.

I look forward to reading it then.

But for now I look forward to the end of bombing.

Everywhere.