The Phrase Poem by John a'Beckett

The Phrase



Some bright thing flashing in the rubble, Warsaw’s war-torn hell,
comes like a spark to sharpen up our memory of days, and in the blaze
flares out to form a passage in a story that we come one day to tell

That Canaletto painting, “Scenes of Varsovie”, uncovered in a cell
in battled Rome, which struck the Pollack soldier’s gaze, goes on and plays
a role to raise out of the dust a new Old Town from Warsaw’s hell

That Chopin Polonaise, the chords a German officer, Wilm Hossenfeld
heard coming from those hands- the pianist whose life he then goes on and saves
becomes moment in Vlad Szpilman’s story that he comes one day to tell

And in a storeroom cell standing open at that page, : , the Holy Bible
“Heaven and Earth may pass away... my words remain”. That lasting phrase
stays on the wall, survives the bombing in the heat of Warsaw’s hell

And that wife of the director, trapped in the building when the shell
hit. Captured, she was sent to prison camp, but kept her days alive with praise
and her escape, despite the danger, weaves a story she would tell:

when she returned to Warsaw where the wall’s words came to spell
that she distributed those Bibles to those who kept their faith amid the phase
of long Soviet dispensation—the long sequel to Warsaw’s hell-
now come to form that story that in songs we sing so as to tell

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