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Contests : War Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2006 : Paula V. Smith
THE THIRD LINE
"The third line of protection would be systems of shelters."
Julian Andrews, London's War: The Shelter Drawings of Henry Moore (2002)
I am talking about the third line
of a sketch covertly drawn
in a close-held notebook:
the artist recording not a view,
but view averted: what struck him
on entering what was, for now, their bedroom.
So, step back. The ordeal happened to other people:
Moore wasn't the one standing in the street
by station's entrance, clutching
a bulky armload of blankets,
shuffling along with the crowd at sirens' sound;
he didn't descend under air damp like a cave
sealed off; he wasn't marking off territory
as they did, coats spread over concrete
platform, re-making in hope of stillness
a space designed for motion.
Nor did he wait for hours, like their forms
slumped on a bench or seated in a doorway,
hands drooped in useless leisure.
Then again,
they were as strange to each other as he to them,
not by choice making their beds together.
Moore paced the platform in a casual way,
then turned a corner or paused on a landing
to pluck a shape or phrase for later use.
His hand conveyed receding lines
of people poured together in long rows
into the tunnel that served as a foyer to sleep.
His sketch, like a blanket, soaks up their outline:
lamps too dim in the damp, cupping
light in its swells; one garment covers all, but for limbs that
stick out from it, the restless molding to the platform
through mottled nights unruled by separate hours.
They cannot see where they lie the world outside
of broken buildings, red light crossed with smoke,
from which the artist emerges to walk home,
his notebook, every page traversed with lines,
tucked in a pocket.
Where is the fourth line drawn?
Sixty years later we get no air-raid warning,
only the banal passenger jets
come to perform a whole new feat with perspective:
charged to illustrate the convergence of all lines
at vanishing point, a place for thousands to sleep
under one dense, gritty blanket of stone.
This poem was a finalist in the 2006 War Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers. Copyright is reserved to the author.
About Paula V. Smith
As the oldest of four children in a US Foreign Service family, Paula Smith lived in Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Peru and Romania. After earning degrees from Swarthmore College and Cornell University, she accepted a faculty position at Grinnell College in Iowa, where she eventually chaired the English department, served four years as Associate Dean of the College, and was selected to teach college courses in London, England during 2002-03. It was here that she discovered the 1940 drawings of Henry Moore. These wartime drawings show human figures in the air-raid shelters that were improvised in stations of the London Underground. Paula Smith's poetry and fiction has been published in journals including The North American Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Flyway, Red Cedar Review and others. Her previous awards include Grand Prize in the 2006 Evolution Poetry Contest (Society for the Study of Evolution); text can be viewed on the SSE web page. With her husband and two children, she lives in a 1917 house in small-town Iowa, except when the chance arises to travel again in the world.
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