Secret Weapon

During World War II
                           there was
                           in our neigbourhood at least
a rumour I had often heard
as gossip in the gardens - that the Germans
                           had a secret weapon, 
                           one that could travel underground
                           and move through earth not moving earth,
                           manufacturing no movement but its own.
It could travel any distance (almost)
                           could creep beneath our feet
                           and our foundations
                           displacing nothing,
                           not the flimsiest root of tree or plant,
noiseless, undetectable, it would leave everything intact
then
    at a given moment
                      or a given signal
blow everything to bits.

I knew people who believed this tale
or said they did
                repeated it as a known fact.

After the war
             a funeral
                      and I began to wonder 
might not the dead behave like that?              
                                   those in the churchyard
stealing their breathless way beneath
                                     our grass roots
disturbing nothing in their journey through the generations
shadows slipping through the eons -
and how many epochs stretching out before them?-
until they find their mark
                          and wreak their vengeance
on the living
             or reward the dark.
                                                                                              
Maybe that was where the Germans 
                               found the concept for their bomb,
and maybe those old gossips had been spot on all along...