Read more poems by Debora Greger: Debora Greger Poems at Poetry X.
Easter 1991 All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. —Yeats Something has rolled from its cave and under the fence of the Botanic Garden, onto the sidewalk: a handful of thorns, their hour come and gone, a hedgehog half-risen, dead leaves cast off— see the place where it lay in the underbrush, a sleepy grenade? Now it drowses in the open, back from the dead of English winter, stunned by the dizzying half-warm sun. The stone rolled away. Two men all in white stood by the tomb— if I've seen them, I haven't known them for what they were, young men from the next island passing for young men here, the gray ones down on their luck, perhaps, who've eked enough for a pint and a game of darts at the local pub. Somewhere, in a potting shed, something waits to be transformed utterly— bags of fertilizer, lengths of pipe— into a homemade bomb. A briefcase left at the railway station, a pane of glass sent flying by the blast, a shattered rain on the chosen "soft target"— this is the beauty of terror, the glass in the midst of all the terrorist knows, who calls the radio station from Her Majesty's pay phone. Minute by minute a timer ticks for ambushed husband, gun-running priest. Why do you seek the living among the dead? Come see the place where he lay, then go quickly. Do not be terrified. Rough beast that bristled at the suggestion that it move— for its thorns we cast lots. It played dead, rolled into a ball you rolled under the fence back into winter, your palm pierced for your trouble. We have bowed at its feet, the leathery dark of the dead. We could not number all its spines. Submitted by C. Dale Young
Added: 1 Mar 2004 | Last Read: 1 Mar 2021 6:13 PM | Viewed: 4634 times
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