I stood on a roof top and they wove their cage <br />Their murmuring throbbing cage, in the air of blue crystal. <br />I saw them gleam above the town like diamond bolts <br />Conjoining invisible struts of wire, <br />Carrying through the sky their geometric cage <br />Woven by senses delicate as a shoal of flashing fish. <br /> <br />They went. They left a silence in our streets below <br />Which boys gone to schoolroom leave in their playground. <br />A silence of asphalt, of privet hedge, of staring wall. <br />In the glass emptied sky their diamonds had scratched <br />Long curving finest whitest lines. <br />These the day soon melted into satin ribbons <br />Falling over heaven's terraces near the golden sun. <br /> <br />Oh that April morning they carried my will <br />Exalted expanding singing in their aeriel cage. <br />They carried my will. They dropped it on a German town. <br />My will expanded and tall buildings fell down. <br /> <br />Then, when die ribbons faded and the sky forgot, <br />And April was concerned with building nests and being hot <br />I began to remember the lost names and faces. <br /> <br />Now I tie the ribbons torn down from those terraces <br />Around the most hidden image in my lines, <br />And my life, which never paid the price of their wounds, <br />Turns thoughts over and over like a propellor <br />Assumes their guilt, honours, repents, prays for them.<br /><br />Stephen Spender<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/on-the-pilots-who-destroyed-germany-in-the-spring-of-1945/
