War: Never-Ending Harvest

   

Early each morning, the river is obscured by fog;

sounds come ashore like cries from Limbo.

At dawn the young women come,

spools of brightly coloured  fabric, with fishing rods;

and, magical spiders, they cast weightless filaments

out over the water;

for a moment there are more threads hanging

than there are people on the streets of London.

The river stops;

nothing stirs; the earth turns a little.

Then suddenly a rod bobs and bends

and stares through its tiny eye into the water;

straining, tensing, till in a slick of weed,

slivered as a newt, a young man's body breaks the surface:

bulb-eyed, marble-chested and tapered

to a train of drops dripping back into the river.

Thousands upon thousands, like unlit lanterns,

or candles newly lifted from wax.

And when the fog clears

the women are standing with their t anterns.

The bank is a thousand miles long

and the river is wider than an ocean.