The Ballad of Tontine Street
(Folkestone, May 25, 1917)
The queues were long on Tontine Street,
It was a market day.
No one looked twice at passing planes—
They often flew that way.
No warning came. No sirens wailed.
Just silence in the sun.
Then steel fell fast through cloudless sky—
By then, the deed was done.
The blast tore through the shopfront glass,
And blood ran with the rain.
The fire left bodies in the street—
And mothers called in vain.
Sixty-three lay dead that day,
Caught out in open air.
Ninety more were pulled alive—
Not all would heal from there.
They carried out the broken forms,
And laid them down in rows.
The numbers grew. The air went still.
Grief tighter than a noose.
There’s nothing left to see now there,
Just shops and paving stones.
But every May, the wind blows strange—
It doesn’t leave alone.
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