Sunday Poem

WIND

Forty paces from the house I live in,

across the street, beside the stone wall

of mottled grey boulders cobbled into place,

the men appear once more, the ones who come

without a word or sign to stand beside

the tall, medieval, wooden catapult

wheeled on stone wheels down the street in the dark

from across the bare outlands, stopping there

opposite my house, beside the stone wall,

and together load awkward, unwieldy

sandbags that are the size of dead bodies

onto the catapult and launch them one

after another against the house front,

and sometimes one of them will come straight up

to the house and bang on the window panes

with his bare fist and then go back to his place,

and when I have just about had enough,

they will suddenly stop, break up, and go,

and just leave the sandbags and the catapult

where they lie, if you can believe it.

From The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (2005) by Jeffery Donaldson