Philip Larkin
The Explosion
On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed toward the pithead:
In the sun the slagheap slept.
Down the lane came men in pitboots
Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke,
Shouldering off the freshened silence.
One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark's eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.
So they passed in beards and moleskins,
Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter,
Through the tall gates standing open.
At noon, there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second, sun,
Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.
The dead go on before us, they
Are sitting in God's house in comfort,
We shall see them face to face--
Plain as lettering in the chapels
It was said, and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion
Larger than life they managed--
Gold as on a coin, or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them,
One showing the eggs unbroken.
Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004.