Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

We see them on the television-screen,
Each shrunk by distance to a manikin,
Lined up across the moor. They seem to lean
Against the raking wind as they begin
Their slow advance; at every pace they pause
And plunge into earth before their toes
Their sharpened sticks; then each of them withdraws
His pointed probe and lifts it to his nose.
We know that they are sniffing for a trace
Of carrion from the scabbard of the ground,
And somewhere in that God-forsaken place
The murdered children lie and must be found.

Not on the screen but being watched by it
The man and woman move about the room,
Lift ornaments and put them down, then sit,
Though only briefly, in the curtained gloom,
Until they rise again and climb the stairs
And prowl around the house. They do not speak
And neither sees the pain the other bears,
Nor understands that what they both now seek,
In dazed, somnambulistic wandering
From room to room, will never be revealed:
Forgiveness, that intolerable thing,
Which all their guilt and suffering will not yield.