And who shall separate the dust
What later we shall be:
Whose keen discerning eye will scan
And solve the mystery?
The high, the low, the rich, the poor,
The black, the white, the red,
And all the chromatic between,
Of whom shall it be said:
Here lies the dust of Africa;
Here are the sons of Rome;
Here lies the one unlabled,
The world at large his home!
Can one then separate the dust?
Will mankind lie apart,
When life has settled back again
The same as from the start?
Notes
Perhaps a reference to Genesis 3:19 (King James Version):
"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."
Or to the burial service in the book of Common Prayer
“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection into eternal life”
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Comments
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This seems to me to be a response to the worries plaguing the world in the aftermath of the the two atomic bombings in 1945.
Two cities and their inhabitants regardless of nationality, creed, political ideology, sex, combat status or anything were reduced to dust and ashes.
Many thought the modern world would end in a similar way.
What then of the ashes that were left on a global scale.
This poem would seem to be asking the same question
Johnson lived through the horrors of this period and the beginnings of electron-microscopy that could be used for the analysis of dust.
Jim
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