THE BLUE TATTOO (1942)

The rhythm of her breathing
Shapes a vision
Of trains leaving cities,
On time and out of time,
Trailing steam
Above hypnotic rails,
Over sleepers
And through tunnels
Of reveries and memories,
Old and new,
Steam-grey, smoke-blue.

‘Move along, move along,’
The guards sneer sing-a-song,
‘It is not your number,
No, not your number,
But vice versa, yes, vice versa.’

History is merely new versions
Of shaven skulls and striped overalls;
Of the showers and the shovels,
And events occurring on another level,
Ash-grey, smoke-blue.

She sleeps shapely
While I lie sick and still,
Awake and at mercy, until
A cry escapes the nursery
Where the infant lies curled
From that other world,
In which dreams never come true,
But nightmares always do,
And the blue tattoo
Runs us all through
And through.


(1980)

Having a baby interfered with my sleep in more than the obvious way.

The sheer scale of the Second World War has always fascinated me. It feels like an age away now and to younger people it probably seems about as meaningful as The War Of The Roses, but when I was a teenager, for instance, it was only a couple of decades past. I count myself very fortunate to have missed that war, but I often wonder what it must have been like to have lived through such times. There have been other holocausts before and after, but the Nazi’s industrial slaughter of the Jews was particularly horrific. As I suggest elsewhere, the fear of a future nuclear Armageddon cast a shadow over parenthood for me, but so did recurrent sleeping and waking dreams of being a family caught up in The Final Solution.

This poem has long been waiting for a picture and last week in Liverpool it finally arrived - more by luck than judgement. We were waiting for a train at the James Street station and I was fascinated by the ‘Dream Passage’ wall sculptures over the track. It was only after taking the picture that I realised it would go perfectly with this poem.