After The Bombing
My hesitant design it was, in a time when no man feared,
To make a poem on the last poor flower to have grown on the patch of land
Where since a gray enormous stack of shops and offices reared
Its bulk as though to eternity there to stand.
Moreover I dreamed of a lyrical verse to welcome another flower,
The first to blow on that hidden sites when the concrete block should cease
Gorging the space; it could not be mine to foretell the means, the hour.
But nature whispered something of a longer lease.
We look from the street now over a breezy wilderness of bloom,
Now crowding its colours between the sills and cellars,
hosts of flames
And foam, pearl-pink and thunder-red, befriending the makeshift tomb
Of a most ingenious but impermanent claim.
–Edmund Blunden
