August 13, 2014
Chris McDonnell, UK
And where to now?
(Comments welcome here)
chris@mcdonnell83.freeserve.co.uk
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August 13, 2014 Chris McDonnell, UK And where to now? (Comments welcome here)
|
chris@mcdonnell83.freeserve.co.uk
|
There
was recently a short piece of mine on this site, later posted on Pray Tell,
called No,
it won’t do. It was written at the height of the bombardment of
The
short piece that follows is within the same context that gave rise to No, it won’t do.
"Like
a shepherd's tent my dwelling is pulled up and removed from me; As a weaver I
rolled up my life He cuts me off from the loom; From day until night you make an
end of me.
There
are, as yet, no cranes
to
clear the rubble,
the
twisted metal rods
of
reinforced concrete,
the
shattered shells of homes.
Fitfully,
people return to streets
where
once they lived,
often
now, impassable, even unrecognisable,
to
find a broken picture frame,
a
child’s book
or
a dust-covered wooden chair,
where
a mother sat at table with her family.
Now
gone.
What
is left,
strewn
under the blue sky
and hot sun?
Memories
of a short time before,
of
calling voices amid the daily press of survival.
The
busy noise of markets, now silenced,
replaced
by the searing, lonely cry
of
a father finding his lost child.
The
fabric of lives, ripped, torn,
cut
off as a weaver cuts cloth from his loom.
Eliot
wrote of a crowd flowing over
“I
had not thought death had undone so many”- *
but
that was then,
in
the immediate post-war years
of
This
is now,
a
linked story, with more lives undone.
Sea
water laps the beach,
with
a gentle, rhythmic pulse,
dust
from the desert hovers in the heat
as
hands and eyes search heaven
for fulfilment of a promise.
*The
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