Sandbags (I)

By Matthew Parish

Tuesday 22 September 2026

They squat where once the flower-sellers stood,

Grey sacks gone darker underneath the rain,

Piled at the bank, the chemist’s, by the school,

As commonplace as gutters, signs and drains.

Nobody looks. The tram goes grinding past.

A woman checks her telephone for trains.

At first they seemed absurd: those swollen heaps

Of earth dragged from some field outside the town,

As though a war could possibly be stopped

By sacks of dirt arranged three courses down.

We photographed them then. We do not now.

The rain comes on. The bags turn green and brown.

Around the opera house, beside the shops,

They make small fortresses of civic things:

A basement window, doorway, bit of wall

Protected from whatever midnight brings.

Above them hang the advertisements still —

Perfume and holidays and wedding rings.

And this, perhaps, is how a war grows old:

Not through the battles printed on the page

But things left standing where they should not be,

Acquiring dirt and moss and middle age.

The extraordinary learns to wait

Until astonishment has turned to usage.

A boy sits smoking on a concrete block.

Two girls go laughing past him arm in arm.

The coffee shops are full. The traffic swears.

An air-raid warning mutters its alarm.

No one runs anywhere. They have all learnt

The mathematics of unlikely harm.

Yet every corner keeps its little mound,

Its grubby barricade against the blast,

As though the city, having thought things through,

Has put some earth between it and the vast

Indifference travelling through the night

At several hundred kilometres fast.

One wonders what becomes of them when peace

Eventually makes such precautions strange.

Will someone come with trucks and take them off,

And sweep the pavement clean, and rearrange

The tables where the sacks have lain for years,

As if removing earth could cancel change?

Perhaps some bag, forgotten round the back

Of an apartment block, will split one spring,

And from the soil collected for the war

A stalk of something purposeless will cling —

A weed, most likely. Nothing picturesque.

No fitting metaphor. Just some green thing.

And people passing may not understand

Why earth was stacked precisely in that place,

Or why the older ones fall briefly still

Before that ordinary, vanished trace.

The city will have other things to fear.

The young will hurry on at their own pace.

But now the sandbags wait on every street,

Unlovely, wet, persistent, without pride.

They do not promise anyone will live.

They merely say that someone, once, has tried

To make a wall between the daily world

And what comes whistling from the other side.