Slowly the women file to where he stands <br />Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair, <br />Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly <br />Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands, <br />Within whose warm spring rain of loving care <br />Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child, <br />What's wrong, the deep American voice demands, <br />And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer <br />Directing God about this eye, that knee. <br />Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled <br /> <br />Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some <br />Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives <br />Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud <br />With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb <br />And idiot child within them still survives <br />To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice <br />At last calls them alone, that hands have come <br />To lift and lighten; and such joy arrives <br />Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd <br />Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice - <br /> <br />What's wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake: <br />By now, all's wrong. In everyone there sleeps <br />A sense of life lived according to love. <br />To some it means the difference they could make <br />By loving others, but across most it sweeps <br />As all they might have done had they been loved. <br />That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache, <br />As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps, <br />Spreads slowly through them - that, and the voice above <br />Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.<br /><br />Philip Larkin<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/faith-healing/
