The stethoscope

19 The stethoscope Dannie Abse Through it, over young women's abdomens tense, I have heard the sound of creation and, in a dead man's chest, the silence before creation began. Should I pray therefore? Hold this instrument in awe and aloft a procession of banners? Hang this thing in the interior of a cold, mushroom-dark church? Should I kneel before it, chant an apophthegm from a small text? Mimic priest or rabbi, the swaying noises of religious men? Never! Yet I could praise it. I should by doing so celebrate my own ears, by praising them praise speech at midnight when men become philosophers; laughter of the sane and insane; night cries of injured creatures, wide-eyed or blind; moonlight sonatas on a needle; lovers with doves in their throats; the wind travelling from where it began. ...