This poem was written in 1941 by farmer, poet, and pastor Philip Britts, who had emigrated a few years earlier from his native England with other members of the Bruderhof to Paraguay as a result of World War II (you can read a summary of that history here). In Paraguay the community, which included three doctors, operated a hospital which served the locality.
Supper was over: we sat
Watching the eyes gleam in the lantern light,
While someone told us something of the wars.
The Germans claim
A million Russians have been killed.
A million men are battered into blood.
A million hearts are stilled.
And what is it to us, who live
So far away?
And what is it to God who made a million stars?
In the wooden building where our doctors work,
A child lay dying,
Cancer in the brain.
And on the stillness of our little night
Her mother’s voice struck, desperate and shrill,
Calling her daughter back from death:
Mahranita! Mahranita!
Trapping the blood in our ears and hearts,
Mahranita! Mahranita!
So that we all cried with her on the night
Turn Death away! Turn Death away!
And when she died, who was a stranger’s daughter,
Our hearts plunged down in blackness, for a wing
Brushed cold across our forehead, snaky dark,
And now ‘round every corner of our square,
Where every day the children play and sing,
We knew Death, vast and hungry at our throat.
What is it, then, to God who gave the spark?