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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About The Poem:

I am currently featuring a series of poems for Tuesday themed around “war”   — because I believe poetry often encapsulates the realism of war and has done so, in terms of modern poetry, for the past century.

As soon as I read Ellen’s Vigil I was struck by the way in which it distills the terrible loss war inflicts on families, tearing gaps in the hearts of those left behind that can never be filled; at best, only thinly papered over.

Bernadette Hall, the editor of the recently published Lorna Staveley Anker anthology, The Judas Tree, also 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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About The Poet:

“LORNA STAVELEY ANKER was born in 1914. She used to joke that this was the cause of the First World War. In truth, the poems in this fine collection reveal her as New Zealand’s first woman war poet. There are poems here that arise from her childhood memories of Kaiser Bill. Three of her uncles died in France.

She was a ‘war widow’ in the Second World War, one of the civilian casualties who make up what is known as ‘the unsung generation’” — from The Judas Tree

Staveley Anker began her involvement with poetry in her fifties. … During her lifetime three books were published, two by her family and one through McBrearty and Associates, and her work was included in anthologies, including war anthologies and Canterbury-based publications.” — from Landfall Review Online, review by Mary Macpherson.

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