Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Brian Edwards
The Shrine
The Shrine
I.
In pre-dawn light she puts on suede slippers and wing-tip glasses, a routine as mechanical as picks made on lottery tickets twice a week: four digits from his dog tags, and the date her son returns from Iraq.
Each day is a tunnel— smooth walls of things missed, and things-to-do. Walls she feels along as if blind to everything but a red circle on a page.
A draft leads her downstairs to uncircled calendar dates before his return next winter.
Pages rouse as she coerces door from jamb. She never could stand to set it right, he'd spent so long hanging it, the week before he left for combat.
She switches on the kitchen light, fires up a pot of tea. Under the window cowslips dance in wait of spring, birch withstands another March. This garden grows slower— each change in colour, the spread of every petal and descent of every leaf, is a slow clock's seconds.
She cuts the teapot's whistle short, saves the bag in a chipped egg cup, plucks a sharpened pencil from a flowerless vase ready to scratch off yesterday from the calendar on the shrine.
II.
What started as a joke is now her truth. A large portrait taken at three, is like a stone perpetually dropped and causing endless ripples; her youngest son pullulates toward the edges: adorable 5-year old fireman; captain of the football team; uniformed in his passing-out parade; outstanding in the class of '99; atop a tank, rifle pointed.
Where else would she put the calendar that counts the days till he's home?
She waits for the first wedge of sun to peer around the neighbour's gable and light the dust that gathers overnight. Is it sand in Iraq that mothers wipe from picture frames at dawn?
