The Journalist

You are not there to weep.
You are there because they are weeping.
And the world must know.

You are not there to show us how you care.
You are there to show how they care.
So the world can care too.

You will not be thanked.
You will not be loved.
Not even by yourself.

The words you did not say,
the tears you did not shed,
will come back to you
years afterwards, when no-one will remember
and no-one understands
that ink can bring enlightenment
but always stains the hand.

Aberfan is a village near Merthyr Tydfil in the Welsh county of Glamorgan. The area was once known for its steel production and collieries. On 21 October 1966 National Coal Board spoil-tip No 7, criminally ill-placed over a mountain spring on a slope above the village, turned to thick black slurry after heavy rainfall and poured down the slope and engulfed the Pantglas junior school and a row of houses, killing 116 children and 28 adults. While the NCB was found responsible for the disaster, it denied all knowledge of the existence of the spring, and no prosecution ensued.

As a young reporter with the Merthyr Express, Grahame Davies covered the 20th anniversary of the disaster. Thirty years later, for the 50th anniversary, he and the poet, Tony Curtis, were commissioned by Life magazine to write a series of poems accompanying a photo-essay by the American photographer IC Rapoport. Curtis wrote in English, Davies in Welsh. This week’s poem is from Davies’s own English translation of his Aberfan sequence, and appears in his newly published collection of poems and songs, A Darker Way.

The poem speaks through its two-part structure. A sternly authoritative voice addresses the journalist in the first three tercets, almost in the tone of a more senior colleague, an experienced reporter of disasters, perhaps, introducing the newcomer to his responsibilities. Every line (nine in total) is end-stopped, as if the voice halted to let each homily sink in.

The first two stanzas build a concept of the job as one of high moral responsibility. Self-control is the prerequisite: “You are not there to weep. / You are there because they are weeping.” The speaker’s passion can be felt in the third line: “And the world must know.” There’s a forgivable touch of self-aggrandising in these words from a local pressman.

Following the same rhetorical emphasis as the first, the second verse’s declaration that the assignment is not to “show us how you care” but showing “how they care” illuminates a small, significant contrast between forms of care. The second implies a particularly personal distress, sharper than the outsider’s professional and possibly assumed concern.

In the third stanza, something interesting happens to the tone. We can still imagine the voice of the boss – but he has suddenly become more introspective. He is perhaps turning over a memory of his work’s reception. It aroused disputes, therefore ingratitude. A final sentence is again interrupted in mid-saying: “You will not be loved. / Not even by yourself.” The pause flips the observation heavily inward: it suggests that a long regretted compromise has produced guilt, and thus the “second thoughts”.

Now the fuller structure of a septet allows increased introspection. The order of responsibilities set out in the opening tercets is reversed: caring is placed before weeping. An older man seems to be reversing the tough but idealistic standards his younger self insisted on. There’s a new source of disillusion: time has passed and no one can sympathise with, or even remember, the failure that haunts the speaker. It appears that, all along, there might have been only a single speaker, searching out the conflict between youthful ideal and an accomplishment seen as inadequate.

At this point, the journalist, focused solely on his reporting of the 20th anniversary of Aberfan, recedes. A poet’s hand underlines the synecdoche, “ink” and the paradox of enlightenment and staining. The symbolism is Christian (light and enlightenment versus the traditionally soul-staining effect of sin), so the scope widens further. Davies might be characterised as a religious poet, though one scarcely more orthodox or comfort-orientated than RS Thomas. The secular and sacred voices of the poet are fused, as journalism and poetry are to some extent brought together and inculpated.

The central problem arises from the act of framing life-experience in language, a framing that can never be entirely truthful. Journalists may have more pressures than poets on their integrity: they must please an editor, serve the paper’s politics and, if a local paper, its community, all the while keeping to a word count. In trying his best to write about and for “the people”, the reporter may cheapen or skew the events he’s dramatising. The poet, freer from the market’s demands, is dealing still more acutely, and singly, with problems of artifice. Those fierce early verses about empathy and communication still resonate at the end of the poem: might the ink of poetry also inscribe the self-seeking they warn against?

The Journalist is a deceptively simple poem, and different from the others in the sequence, which are closer to the sympathetic journalistic perspective demanded by their material and occasion. But it asks important questions about the validity and impurity of all writing about real events.

• Tony Curtis’s most recent collection is Leaving the Hills. A transcript of the Aberfan Conference at the University of Cardiff provides further essential reading.