Reginald Levy
The Pain Behind the Eye
Migraine is an answer:
Nausea, disturbance of the retina,
And pain behind the eye
Are solving something.
The flickering retina
Of the TV set shows
Strikers, a wedding, the war-worn,
(Cliches) riot, floods and famine,
Men walking the moon, descending
Safe, and much rejoicing;
The anodyne?
Or just another symptom?
Like the prisoner, bound, defenceless,
Shot through the head
In a city street:
A photographic prize, won
Through the eye of the world,
The hungry journalistic lens,
Unsleeping eye,
With pain behind it.
Migraine is one-sided, War
Inside the head stops thought:
Self-absorbed, self-pitying,
All know neurosis now.
For Eysenck symptom
and disease are one:
Turn off the news,
Obliterate the memory —
Auschwitz, Belsen, long ago,
And ditches filled with corpses
(Sometimes the bodies moved
While earth was piled on top).
Hiroshima was an answer.
No lack of symptoms then.
No shelter from the lurking pain,
The pain behind the eye,
Until the searing anodyne
Of the final cloud shall
Eliminate all symptoms,
The eyes first, and the pain behind the eye.
Page(s) 18-19
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