Not beautiful

46 Not beautiful Dannie Abse In all hiroshimas, in raw and raving voices, live skeletons of the Camp, flies hugging faeces, in war, in famine, he'd find the beautiful. Being saintly, his vocation was to find it at the dying bedside, in the disrobing dead. And what he did, they said, you should be trying. Well, once, while dissecting a nerve in a cadaver my cigarette dropped, fell into its abdomen. I picked it up. I puffed out the smoke of hell. Yet still was not fit for time to come: the freehold grave, things run over like slush all bloody and throbbing— for though they were dumb, not beautiful, I said. It's the parable again of the three wise men: the first who, with finger and thumb, tweaked his nostrils, and the second who pressed his eyes to his palms, whilst the third, the wisest, cried, 'Oh what beautiful, white teeth have these vermin which died.' Homo sum, etc., but the third was divine (as they said). One sees the good point, of course, and may admire it; but, sometimes, I think that to curse is more sacred than to pretend by affirming. And offend. ...