Joint Second Prizewinner: Eddie Wainwright
Tying Loose Ends
A brown Lieutenant and his men,
Half-dressed in national uniform,
Stand at my door, and I complain
Of the foul weather, hail and rain,
A pear tree broken by the storm.
W.B. Yeats, Meditations in Time of Civil War
A trifling domestic tale, ignorable
except to us: a garden fence
of enduring posts and matchwood panels
threatens to break up in a rogue gale.
We brace it with timbers
stout enough to furnish a second Mary Rose.
The gale’s from the hectic East, emblematic
this sweet April as Jews and Arabs
squander each other’s blood by the gallon. Our prop,
though large enough to buttress a large church,
probably won’t endure. The hurricane assails
trees and bones and walls. We’ve done all we can,
we reassure each other, as helicopter gunships,
tanks and cut-throats slaughter on in sunny Palestine.
The wind screams through a bulletin of griefs -
cars thundering into trees, the sea crippling the coast -
as we expect any moment the frail wires that support
the burden of our heat and light and news to fall apart.
But the makeshift stanchion, our feeble bid for peace
this night, if not for evermore, holds up, holds on.
Page(s) 72
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