Faith Healing by Philip Larkin

Faith Healing

Slowly the women file to where he stands   

Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,

Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly   

Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,   

Within whose warm spring rain of loving care   

Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,

What’s wrong, the deep American voice demands,   

And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer   

Directing God about this eye, that knee.   

Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled

Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some   

Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives

Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud   

With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb   

And idiot child within them still survives   

To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice   

At last calls them alone, that hands have come   

To lift and lighten; and such joy arrives

Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd   

Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice—

What’s wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:   

By now, all’s wrong. In everyone there sleeps   

A sense of life lived according to love.

To some it means the difference they could make   

By loving others, but across most it sweeps

As all they might have done had they been loved.   

That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,   

As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,

Spreads slowly through them—that, and the voice above   

Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.