Tuesday Poem: Refeaturing “Ellen’s Vigil” by Lorna Staveley Anker for ANZAC Week
Ellen’s Vigil
……..Benjamin……..Isaac…….Tom
Passchendaele…..Ypres…and Somme
…………….three ovals float
…………….on the cold wall
plastered whiter
………………………………..than their bones,
young, khaki’d,
…………………..their bud-tender eyes
…………………..premonition filled.
Ellen,
her three boys gone,
………………transplanted seventy years
……………………from Lurgan’s linen
no longer counts crops
……………………………………in season
…..but digs, diligently, delicately,
…………………………………….digs down
……………………………………….further down
…..her spade searching
……………………her garden for
……….three lost sons
.
………….Thomas Isaac and Ben.
.
© Lorna Staveley Anker, 1914 – 2000
From The Judas Tree, edited by Bernadette Hall, Canterbury University Press, 2013
Reproduced with permission.
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Over the past four years since joining the Tuesday Poem community I have featured a considerable number of other poets “of a Tuesday”, so over the next while will be refeaturing all those who have have had more than one poem posted here. As this is ANZAC week I will begin with Lorna Staveley Anker’s Ellen’s Vigil. The poem was first featured on September 13 last year.
Bernadette Hall, the editor of the recently published Lorna Staveley Anker anthology, The Judas Tree, provided the following note:
“When Lorna was a very small child, she lived for a time with her grandmother, Ellen. This poem arises from her wartime memories of her grandmother’s grief stricken household. This is the most frequently published of Lorna’s poems. It was included in Lauris Edmond’s 1986 collection of prose and poetry ‘Women in Wartime’. And in the first Australasian volume of women’s poetry ‘Kiwi & Emu’‘, 1989, edited by Barbara Petrie. A copy of the poem lies in the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in front of the National War Memorial in Wellington.”
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