War+Photographer+text

**//by Carol Ann Duffy//**
In his darkroom he is finally alone with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows. The only light is red and softly glows, as though this were a church and he a priest preparing to intone a Mass. Belfast. Beirut, Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.

He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays beneath his hands which did not tremble then though seem to now. Rural England. Home again to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel, to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet of running children in a nightmare heat.

Something is happening. A stranger’s features faintly start to twist before his eyes, a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries of this man’s wife, how he sought approval without words to do what someone must and how the blood stained into foreign dust.

A hundred agonies in black-and-white from which his editor will pick out five or six for Sunday’s supplement. The reader’s eyeballs prick with tears between bath and pre-lunch beers. From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where he earns a living and they do not care.

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