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All over newspapers have stopped appearing,
and combatants everywhere are returning home.
No one knows what is happening.
The generals are on the phone with the President,
a former feature writer for the Globe and Mail.
No one knows even who has died, or how,
or who won last night, anything.
Those in attendence on them may,
for all we know, still be there.
All over newspapers have stopped appearing.
Words once more, more than ever,
have begun to matter. And people are writing
poetry. Opposing regiments, declares a friend,
are refusing evacuation, are engaged instead
in sonnet sequences; though they understand, he says,
the futility of iambics in the modern world.
That they are concerned with the history and meaning
of prosody. That they persist in their exercises
with great humility and reverence.
©2001, Robert Sward
Robert Sward is the author of Three Dogs and a Parrot, A Much-Married Man, A Novel, the multimedia piece “Earthquake Collage” & editor of the literary e-zine Pares cum paribus. He served as judge for the InterBoard Poetry Competition from November 2000 to April 2001.
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