25 December 1960

Ward one-hundred-and-thirty in the passage on the right.
It's five in the morning for the milk-cart
has gone with its horses, eyes gleaming
in the bayonets of the street lights.
The twenty-fifth of December nineteen-sixty.
The children sleep
in Christmas stockings between satellites
hobby-horses, revolvers and toffees
Sleep, before the sirens of the sun
before the bombers which are butterflies
sleep in your Christmas stockings and candles.
On Hospital Hill stands a blazing tree.
Ward one-hundred-and-thirty in the passage on the right.
"Sure he drank a bottle of brandy
and lay hours in an oxygen tent.
You know he was an alcoholic from
his first glass." (Look, the gleam
of day's bright gun-barrel aims over the city!)
"A yes but, he once said himself
he had a harking after his dead God.
His final words? No
he just lay quiet, and with eyes wide."
Ward one-hundred-and-thirty. He has been
attended to, eyes closed, hands already folded,
the whole of the room like an upraised shield.
And on the window-sill and against the light
the mantis in unending prayer.