Poetic Justice

Twenty-seven years after her death, Bronwen Wallace’s poetry feels newly relevant in the #MeToo era

- ANITA LAHEY

In early January 2017, sixty-nine-year-old Robert Francis was sen-enced for the long-term abuse of his common-law wife of forty-five years. As reported in the Kingston WhigStandard, Francis’s extraordinary brutality had left his wife with multiple skull and rib fractures, at least one broken arm that hadn’t been set, cauliflower ears worthy of an old-time boxer, and scars on her arms and feet from what appeared to be cigarette burns. The violence had possibly contributed to brain damage so profound she could no longer speak.

During the sentencing, Crown attorney Jennifer Ferguson adopted a highly unusual tactic — exhibiting verse as evidence. The poem offered up was, according to Ferguson, based on an incident in the life of Francis’s wife, whose home, in the judge’s words, appeared “to have been a torture chamber.” Ferguson read aloud from a passage that included the following:

This is for Ruth, brought in by the police from Hotel Dieu emergency eyes swollen shut, broken jaw wired and eighteen stitches closing one ear.

This is what a man might do if his wife talked during the 6 o’clock news.

“And I knew better,” she tells us softly,

“I guess I just forgot myself.”

Tomorrow she may go back to him (“He didn’t mean it, he’s a good man really”), but tonight she sits up with me drinking coffee through a straw.