More than food

Then said the Lord Behold, I will rain bread
from heaven for you - but how could we believe it?
Our best men gone, away in prison or dead,
a famished people left behind to grieve it.
If God's bread came, would we live to receive it?
But He said: In the morning ye shall see
the glory of the Lord and know that He
who sees your grief is mighty to relieve it.
And in the morning, lo, before our eyes
there comes His manna dropping from the skies.

For thundering along the vault of heaven
wave upon wave of planes come roaring over.
No shot is fired, no siren warning given:
a peaceful raid before the war is over.
We hold our breaths. The very birds that hover
and hang about the sky stricken with awe expect
their giant brethren's deeds, who swerve about, direct
their course to mellow fields speckled with flowers and clover
where lapwings play and singing larks arise,
and there drop tons of manna from the skies!

It's terrible to pray for bombs to fall,
knowing you may be killed, yet to continue
to pray because you know that after all
nothing but bombs will cut the enemy's sinew;
to fear and yet to pray with all that's in you:
God, let them fall, for we must win this war!
Rather be killed than crushed and trampled o'er
by those who hate because they cannot win you.
Our prayer was heard and bombs of every size
rained down, a devilish manna, from the skies.

All this is over now. We look on high,
and planes that carried death and devastation
to foe and friend alike now fill the sky,
drop boons instead of bombs and bring salvation
to friendly people of a friendly nation.
They prove the promise ringing in our ear
that all men shall be free from want and fear,
they are the Charter's tactual revelation:
no fear or want where'er the bomber flies
that drops its tons of manna from the skies.

Pilots who come to us even while waging
the bloodiest war that ever yet befell
mankind and that for five years has been raging
around and o'er us, making life a hell,
look how we wave at you! Now all is well.
Look how we raise our children on our shoulder.
We promise they'll be men and women bolder
and better than we are, and that they'll tell
their children's children when they're old and wise
how men like Gods dropped manna from the skies.

April 29th 1945.

This ballad was written by Yge Foppema in The Hague, Holland on April 29th, 1945, the first day of the food-droppings, with the Allied planes still thundering overhead. It was printed on a man-powered press, driven by means of a bicycle and used for printing unterground literature during the German occupation, at the exposition "The Free Book in Unfree Time- in Amsterdam, July 1945.

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