Menace

Huddled beneath the pines that night,
we’d crept from our houses nearby
I suppose it might have looked as if
we came to gawp and spy.

That was not what brought us out.
Alarmed when the new wife screamed,
we wanted to ask if we could help
but nothing was as it seemed.

Inside, she’d waved a blade about—
I never saw the knife—
her husband claimed he wrenched the thing
from the grip of his frantic wife.

Their lights went out; we women left,
our street grew still again:
an unfinished stillness heavy with fear
and the murmur of troubled men.

Suzanne Edgar