Sandbags (II)

By Matthew Parish

Monday 21 September 2026

They’ve been here long enough to look like street

Furniture: bins, bollards, signs, cement.

The rain has softened them; the dogs have pissed

Against the lower ones. Their first intent

Was something grander, naturally. Defence.

Like most grand purposes, it came and went.

The sacks remain. Outside the corner shop

They sag beneath a plywood-covered pane.

Someone has balanced coffee on the top.

A taxi splashes gutter-water again.

War, after all, is mainly waiting round

For something worse to happen in the rain.

We used to photograph them. Christ, how strange:

Sandbags in Europe! History returned!

We liked the thought less later, when we learnt

What history meant once houses really burned.

There comes a point when novelty wears off

And leaves you with the lesson you have earned.

At half past nine the restaurants are full.

At ten the sirens start. Nobody moves.

A waiter carries three more beers outside.

The young continue practising their loves.

Somewhere a colonel studies little maps.

Somewhere a drone adjusts itself above.

The sacks know nothing, which is their chief charm.

They make no speeches, wave no bloody flag,

Predict no victory by Christmas-time,

Nor tell you dying is a splendid gag.

They simply sit between you and the blast:

A hundredweight of earth inside a bag.

And earth is what it comes to anyway.

No point pretending otherwise. The dead

Receive it eventually, shovel by shovel,

While politicians say what must be said.

The living meanwhile queue for cigarettes

And check which districts still have power instead.

There is a kind of honesty in this.

No marble angel, trumpet, wreath or stone;

Just dirt that might absorb a piece of steel

Before it reaches muscle, blood and bone.

A poor arrangement, certainly, but then

Most guarantees turn out to be on loan.

In summer weeds push through the splitting seams.

By winter they are frozen into walls.

In spring the thaw produces little streams

Of muddy water underneath the malls.

The seasons carry on, offensively,

Indifferent to whichever city falls.

Perhaps when peace arrives they’ll clear them all.

Some council truck will take the things away.

The banks will wash their windows. Shops will put

Their pavement advertising out each day.

And everyone will marvel how the street

Looks wider than they somehow thought it lay.

For several weeks the absence will seem odd.

Then no one under twenty-five will care.

A woman will put flowers where they stood.

A cyclist will complain about a chair.

The past will shrink to photographs in phones

Until the phones themselves are no longer there.

And those who saw them every bloody day

Will sometimes find, approaching some old door,

A phantom heap of dirty sacks still piled

Exactly where it isn’t any more.

Not grief, precisely. Nothing quite so grand.

Just knowing what the ordinary is for.