War Photographer - Carol Ann Duffy (b. 1955)

CONTEXT

• "Belfast, Beirut, Phnom Penh" are all locations that have been ravaged by war.
• Duffy knew two war photographers, she sympathises with what they see and do, despite apathy at home.

In his darkroom he is finally alone

with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.

The only light is red and softly glows,

as though this were a church and he

a priest preparing to intone a Mass.

Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.

He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays

beneath his hands, which did not tremble then

though seem to now. Rural England. Home again

to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,

to fields which don't explode beneath the feet

of running children in a nightmare heat.

Something is happening. A stranger's features

faintly start to twist before his eyes,

a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries

of this man's wife, how he sought approval

without words to do what someone must

and how the blood stained into foreign dust.

A hundred agonies in black-and-white

from which his editor will pick out five or six

for Sunday's supplement. The reader's eyeballs *****

with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers.

From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where

he earns his living and they do not care.

"spools of suffering set out in ordered rows" - sibilance makes it sound quiet - maybe out of respect?

"A hundred agonies in black-and-white

from which his editor will pick out five or six

for Sunday's supplement. The reader's eyeballs *****

with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers" - 'black and white' stark unmistakable terms. 'Sunday's supplement' sibilance like hiss of annoyance that it didn't make the main news. '*****' superficial pain. 'tears + beers' internal rhyme helps to flow like the tears/emotions that the images created.