The Ordnance of the Lip

by Deirdre Parkes

In the bedrock of the Atlantic gallery, something violent is frozen mid-shatter. A rusted casing, jagged and split, bitten hard by the grey tooth of granite. A blast held captive by the stone: I look at it and see your quiet, the heavy masonry of your posture. A boy from the Barnardo wards, almost shipped away. Adopted, renamed, hardened: a stiff upper lip cast in imperial iron. The RAF gave you a uniform and wings, but the sea gave you your deepest silence. You spoke of a ship, of the Galway coast, the pitch-black water of a midnight landing, the hull scraping the shore— and then the sentence would always break. Like the ordnance buried in the hills of Bere, you carried the live fire deep inside the rock: A lifetime spent keeping the detonator dry, holding the shrapnel tight within the ribcage. Even now, encased in the quiet of the past, the copper bleeds its green and rust into the stone.