After the First Death

Belmont Club has this precisely written piece regarding history and living.

His closing note sent a chill...I had memorized that poem, fascinated by it's stark beauty, while growing up...Dylan Thomas:

"During WWII, after a German V-2 rocket attack killed a child in London, Dylan Thomas wrote his famous poem:

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."