Ellerker Gardens

Learning to count to six, out of habit,

as, standing in Ellerker Gardens,

you’d watch, each night, the fire curtain

draw across the roofs of London;

you were listening for a silence in that storm,

the absence of an unexploded bomb.

Could you be so absorbed you’d not recall

an insect bite, a broken date,

the instinct for survival which ensured

you kept well clear of the house

until your father had been and gone?

Just heroism of the ordinary sort

among lattices of blown-out beams

would see you safe, in some way at least,

as you searched through the blackout and blast

for whatever fate was lying, waiting,

cradled in the sixth silence.