They carried the bodies to the football ground,

and laid them out in rows on the scuffed turf.

The injured, on the wards of the Prince of Wales,

could have stood at the windows, called

and winced in their dressings and slept and still not heard

their own name back. No hack, no recording angel

listed the missing for the Weekly Herald

or the teams to come, with their kit and their silver cups

and players escaped from continents where war

is more personal, machete, Kalashnikov.

They see what’s next: girl searching through the streets

till a neighbour runs out and holds her; charred wood or brick;

and what’s not said. After the ceasefire comes

a space of sixty years when you can’t quite mourn,

but work and clean and shop and wash and cook,

meet friends, make love, look in on a child asleep,

then spot him in the crowd in the stands, singing

while heroes race and bellow across the pitch,

and skin and voice, invisible particles,