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.