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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
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Cecil Day-Lewis
Newsreel (1938)
Enter the dream-house, brothers and sisters, leaving
Your debts asleep, your history at the door:
This is the home for heroes, and this loving
Darkness a fur you can afford.
Fish in their tank electrically heated
Nose without envy the glass wall: for them
Clerk, spy, nurse, killer, prince, the great and the defeated,
Move in a mute day-dream.
Bathed in this common source, you gape incurious
At what your active hours have willed –
Sleep-walking on that silver wall, the furious
Sick shapes and pregnant fancies of your world.
There is the mayor opening the oyster season:
A society wedding: the autumn hats look swell:
An old crocks’ race, and a politician
In fishing-waders to prove that all is well.
Oh, look at the warplanes! Screaming hysteric treble
In the low power-dive, like gannets they fall steep.
But what are they to trouble –
These silver shadows – to trouble your watery, womb-deep sleep?
See the big guns, rising, groping, erected
To plant death in your world’s soft womb.
Fire-bud, smoke-blossom, iron seed projected –
Are these exotics? They will grow nearer home!
Grow nearer home – and out of the dream-house stumbling
One night into a strangling air and the flung
Rags of children and thunder of stone niagaras tumbling,
You’ll know you slept too long.
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